Anna Araujo’s first day of school in Orange County was filled with unfamiliar sounds. Sentences escaped her classmates’ mouths with empty meaning. Words were only iterations, sounds she couldn’t decipher.
Araujo emigrated from Mexico to Orange County with her family when she was 10 years old. When she started school in California in the 4th grade, she spoke no English besides the few words she had learned through pop music on the radio. Now, nearly four decades later, Araujo is the Executive Director of the Boys and Girls Club of East Los Angeles.
“Because of my own experience I can see a piece of myself in the students come to the club,” Araujo said. “Most of them go to school in the local area, and come from homes where English is not the primary language, so I empathize with them.”
In Araujo’s case, she was forced to learn English quickly because she was one of only few Spanish-speaking students in her school. At Brooklyn Avenue Elementary School and Belvedere Middle School only a few blocks from the Boys and Girls Club, the situation is much different. Since one-third of Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) 600,000 students are English language learners, the situation in these schools is much more complex.
New this school year, in an effort to personalize the district’s English Language Development (ELD) program, LAUSD mandated that each school offer a new program called Maintenance English Learning Development. The program aims to foster both a student’s native language and English learning simultaneously. This marks the first significant change in the district’s ELD program since the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998, which removed bilingual education from the curriculum.
Yet according to Jose Delgadilllo, a volunteer at the Boys and Girls Club and an English language coordinator at Dena Elementary School, there are very few schools that are utilizing the new program. In order to start a Maintenance ELD classroom, there must be at least 30 parents in a given grade who are interested in enrolling their student in the program. A lack of funding is also standing in the way of implementing the program across the district, Delgadillo said.
“You would be hard-pressed to find the program operating in L.A. Unified right now,” Delgadillo said. “I am mandated to provide the option to parents, but since our school does not offer the program I can only give them permission to attend another school, and that’s often too inconvenient for parents who work at least one job, are very limited as far as income, and are not going to be able to drive further to drop off their kids so it becomes too much of a hindrance to them.”
According to Delgadillo, Proposition 227’s ban on bilingual education has had a negative impact on the education and self-esteem of native Spanish-speaking students. While the Maintenance ELD Program is a step towards reestablishing the benefits of bilingual education, its scarcity in the district makes it difficult for the program to be effective.“A lot of studies show that in the long run dual language and bilingual programs are better than completely trying to eliminate a student’s native language, and subsequently their culture,” Delgadillo said.
Byanka Barajas works with students at Brooklyn Avenue Elementary School daily as a site coordinator for the LAUSD Beyond The Bell after school program. She said she sees the negative effect that traditional ELD education has on her students because it favors students who are fluent in English.
“I see a lot of teachers at this school who take the approach of beating the Spanish out of their students, rather than fostering both languages,” Barajas said. “It creates an elimination of Spanish culture, and creates a negative stigma about students who are learning Spanish, and many of those students get bullied more often.”
For this reason, Barajas said, it’s important that LAUSD effectively implements the Maintenance ELD program, not only for the sake of student’s education, but also to foster the wellbeing and self-esteem of an already marginalized group.
“If we want our Hispanic students to succeed, we need to give them the skills and resources, but also tell them it is good to be proud of their heritage because confidence is key,” Barajas said.