David Harris went to his daughter’s first day of kindergarten at Indian Grove School in Mt. Prospect and noticed that the teacher had to spend 10 minutes explaining to another pupil, a boy who did not understand English, where he was supposed to sit.
Harris, 38, later learned that his daughter’s class of 22 pupils included six who did not speak English.
And among just the 88 kindergartners in River Trails School District 26, of which Indian Grove is a part, 23 speak other languages. Among the languages are Polish; the Indian language Gujarati; Vietnamese; Malayan; Japanese; Korean; Punjabi; Ukrainian; Arabic; Bosnian; and Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines.
Harris grew alarmed at the prospect of one teacher trying to handle a roomful of precocious 5-year-olds who do not all speak the same language. He wondered whether a few children’s progress would come at the expense of others.
Those concerns highlight the challenges faced by suburban public schools that have to be innovative and sensitive, yet fiscally conservative, in responding to communities that are growing and diversifying.
In suburban Cook County alone, the number of “limited-English-proficient” students has nearly tripled, to 22,121, from more than a decade ago. The number of students also has tripled, to nearly 4,000, in DuPage County over the past decade and has gone up by more than 150 percent in Lake and Kane Counties.
The proportion of limited-English-proficient students in the Chicago Public Schools compared with the rest of the state is down from 1985, when Chicago had 64 percent of the total.
Now, Chicago has a little more than half, about 63,000 children, with the other 51,000 scattered throughout suburban Cook and the collar counties.
Complicating the situation is the variety of languages being spoken: 113 among Illinois public schoolchildren this year, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.
The result is that suburban school districts, especially smaller ones, are increasingly integrating the children who cannot speak English with the ones who can.
At North Palos School District 117, which serves students in Palos Hills and Hickory Hills, 101 students out of a population of 2,300 are involved in a bilingual-education program in which students with limited or no English skills spend most of the day in a regular classroom. But they are pulled out for part of the day for sessions with an instructor in English as a second language.
“I have three (English as a second language) students who sit at different tables with the other children,” said Tina Dvorak, a 1st-grade teacher at Dorn Primary Center in Hickory Hills. “The kids in the classroom look out for them. There’s a lot of peer-tutoring going on.”
Educators say that based on test scores and research, integrating classrooms has proved a success. But parents such as Harris, although they support them in principle, fear that if such integrated classes are not run correctly, the English-speaking and non-English-speaking pupils will suffer.
“With 25 kids in a class where 25 percent don’t speak English (as in Indian Grove), common sense tells you the teacher is going to be diverted away from the English-speakers to the non-English-speakers, and it’s not fair to either group,” Harris said.
When the state began requiring bilingual education in the early 1970s, the dominant foreign language spoken was Spanish, and children attended separate programs in which portions were taught in Spanish by bilingual instructors.
Spanish is still the dominant foreign language by far–overall, 77 percent of limited-English-proficient students in Illinois speak Spanish–and many larger districts still conduct the traditional programs. But a number of influences in the last decade have led to the addition of a more integrated approach to bilingual education, especially in suburban districts.
Schools are seeing a rapidly growing influx of people who speak other languages, most of them from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, schools nationally have been trying to promote multiculturalism and have been given more flexibility to devise their own bilingual-education programs.
But funding has not kept pace with the growth in the number of students with limited English skills in Illinois public schools. This school year, the state is spending about $474 a pupil on bilingual-education programs. That is nearly $150 less than was spent per pupil in 1990-91, even though there are 34,709 more pupils in the programs.
And schools still are constrained by tight budgets and a shortage of instructors trained in teaching English as a second language, as well as tutors who can speak any of the myriad languages the children know.
Ron Perlman, director of the Illinois Resource Center in Des Plaines, which develops programs and trains teachers for culturally diverse children, said, “The trend is more toward putting the kids together and looking at the school as an ecological community where everybody plays a role in the whole and everybody is responsible for everybody else.”
It especially makes sense “when you only have two of this (language) or four of that or two of the other, or in the smaller districts,” said Marlene Kamm, superintendent at East Prairie School District 73 in Skokie, where students come from about 30 language backgrounds.
“The children that come lacking English skills bring other assets that are welcome: new cultural celebrations, a new world view,” said Barbara Marler-Falcone, language-programs coordinator for District 15 in Palatine, where students speak 53 languages.
Schools in general reduce the burden on regular teachers by using trained tutors, aides or sometimes parent volunteers. And many “regular-education” teachers are using a more hands-on, activity-based approach that ignores language barriers. The state does not set a special teacher-pupil ratio for classrooms that are integrated by language ability.
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Many teachers applaud their programs. They say they do not have to pay an inordinate amount of attention to the few pupils in their class who are learning English and that no child’s education is suffering as a result.
At Naperville North High School, chemistry teacher Beverly George said that contrary to the notion that kids with limited language abilities demand more attention, she has to draw out such students to participate in class discussions.
Cheryl Heater, a 1st-grade teacher at Jefferson School in Hoffman Estates, said she has found that her pupils learn better by learning from one another.
“My children love to learn to say things in Japanese or Spanish, and the more I can give them a different chance to say something, the better,” Heater said. “From my experience, they’re all more eager, more attentive.”
But Ken Feeney, 38, of Mt. Prospect said he had an unsettling experience recently when he took his daughter to kindergarten orientation at Indian Grove School.
He saw how long it took parents of the English as a second language students to grasp what the teacher was telling them about the lunch routine.
“My initial reaction was one of panic,” he said. But his wife, a kindergarten teacher, urged him to wait and see.
He recently asked his daughter what she thinks of her class.
“My daughter’s extremely happy,” he said. “To her, it’s not a problem, so it’s not a problem for us.
“But it’s something we’re keeping an eye on.”