IMMIGRANT STUDENTS IN D.C. LEARN HARD LESSON
Sitting in a languid, virtually empty school cafeteria, Simon Kingpo summed up his version of the American Dream late Thursday and, unwittingly, the latest indignity authored in the nation’s capital:
“If we speak English, we get a better job. If we get better job, we pay more tax.”
It wasn’t flawless. But it was impressive enough for a 29-year-old who six months ago arrived from Senegal, where he was an accountant, and is taking intensive English classes while washing dishes at a restaurant.
Kingpo, along with two classmates from Madagascar, including a college professor who cleans houses while he masters the language, was found chatting inside the Carlos Rosario Adult Education Center. It’s a weathered, 68-year-old fortress and one of two adult-ed outposts in what passes for a big-city school system.
A week ago, I described how the public schools in Washington, D.C., went begging for light bulbs, getting 20,000 surplus bulbs from the Pentagon. It struck some sort of nerve. A Page One story in the Washington Times followed, as did a weeklong microanalysis of Washington’s ills on Oliver North’s syndicated radio show (hosted last week by Chicago’s Bruce Dumont).
Well, it’s clear they have figured out an ingenious solution to the light bulb shortage.
Close the schools.
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Not all the schools but enough to leave the likes of Kingpo scratching their heads.
Last week, the schools superintendent for the District of Columbia announced that, for budgetary reasons, seven would be gone by June 30. They include, incredibly, both adult education centers and two vocational schools, all heavily attended by immigrants.
The timing was impeccable: The Senate was debating immigration reform, with many members extolling their own proud ethnic heritage.
To rising crime and AIDS rates, growing number of potholes, uncollected garbage and unrepaired street and traffic lights, add this, a school system in free fall and telling immigrants to take a hike.
Enrollment in the system is 80,000, down from just under 150,000 in 1970. Parents got nervous and split to the suburbs. The remaining, often decaying, buildings are desperately short of everything, from new books to toilet paper.
The superintendent says no teacher will lose his or her job. He also claims that other schools will pick up the slack which, as far as the thousands of adult education students are concerned, seems unlikely.
One thus had a reversal of the neutron bomb, that odd Carter-era idea whose rationale struck me as meaning that you could knock out an enemy’s house but save the patio furniture.
Here, you save the teachers but, poof, there go the students!
“Oh, for me, they have plans,” said Sonia Gutierrez, the principal of Rosario. “They say they’ll divide the city into two parts, and I’d coordinate adult-ed in one of them.”
Lest one buy into the cover story of merely shifting the classes elsewhere, Gutierrez said unequivocally, “Once you move the classes out of this building, the programs will disappear.”
“These people so badly want to be good Americans, to be mainstream. Without English, they will be exploited and discriminated against and end up on welfare,” said Gutierrez, a Puerto Rican native and pro-student activist, known for leading demonstrations against the perceived inanities of the school board.
Gutierrez, who arrived at Rosario as a counselor in 1972, has seen its student body grow to more than 2,000 from 150. It’s open all year and has day, afternoon and evening sessions with a faculty of just 42.
The students come from more than 100 countries. Hunched over the desk in a cramped office, she rattled off a bunch of countries–Ethiopia, China, Pakistan, Russia, the Ivory Coast–before stopping. Her annual budget was a mere $2 million before being cut to $1.5 million and, then, initially eliminated last year.
Gutierrez led protests and got what she thought was an agreement for funding for a few more years as she strove to become self-sufficient. She was wrong.
“The majority of students are legals. The illegals don’t come to the capital of the United States. They’re not that dumb,” she said with the political incorrectness of a bloodless truth-teller.
The daytime students, she said, tend to be in their early 20s, with 6th- and 7th-grade educations and hardly any English-language skills. They hold menial jobs, washing dishes like the Senegalese accountant, or housekeeping, as his friends from Madagascar.
Those in the evening are older, more mature, she said, but all are bound by a desire to get ahead. They also seek to fill the voids left by the central bureaucracy: helping to buy paint for the cafeteria, raising money for photocopy paper.
“The main goal here is specifically giving immigrants skills they need to be mainstream,” Gutierrez said. “Teach them how to be good, responsible citizens. We don’t just teach the language, but also the traditions and customs, of the United States.”
Before heading to a meeting, she led me to the cafeteria, where students had completed placards for a Friday protest at board headquarters. There, I found the Senegalese and husband-wife couple from Madagascar.
They each have their green cards and came here for opportunity. They are unsettled by what seems to them a crowning irony.
“All Americans are immigrants, no?” said Paul Bezandry, 36, the math professor-turned-housekeeper”
“We need to learn English. We cannot take part in the economy. Difficult for me to integrate. To be integrated. You understand what I mean?”
Cokie watch
In case you’re in Las Vegas Wednesday, a road show of “The McLaughlin Group,” in this case Fred Barnes, Morton Kondracke, Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page, will be performing for an hour at Bally’s before the American Management Association. They’ll share about $10,000 and get first class airfare to and fro.
Demi watch
For starters, let’s assume imitation is the sincerest form of flattery as the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville unveils a “Demi Watch,” namely the latest spotting of actress Demi Moore, or hubby Bruce Willis, as she shoots a new film in the area.
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Then, in an exclusive worthy of such journalism giants as Liz Smith, “Entertainment Tonight” and “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” I disclose the following:
Attorney Martin Singer of the Los Angeles law firm of Lavely & Singer, noting that “our office is litigation counsel for Demi Moore,” has written to the paper and bemoaned not only its encouragement of readers to contact it with Moore spottings but its audacity to print the results.
“My client will not tolerate her privacy rights being violated by you. On behalf of my client, I am hereby demanding that you immediately cease and desist from publishing information about my client’s whereabouts under your `Demi Watch’ articles or otherwise. Should you fail to do so, we will hold the newspaper and all those acting in concert with the newspaper fully accountable for all damages suffered by my client, including without limitation, compensatory damages, damages for emotional distress, and punitive damages.”
No doubt, Singer’s parents would be overwhelmed with pride for the years of education culminating in their son’s passionate concern for, and vigorous defense of, individual rights.
Alas, given a client who has profited by exhibiting virtually every part of her anatomy , such demands for discretion fall a tad short.