Posted on 07/26/2008 11:13:58 AM PDT by BJungNan
School Budget Cuts Derail English Language Program
By Dean Gray and Jackie Devereaux
Coachella Valley, CA – An important English reading fluency program is threatened to end due to severe budget cuts to this year’s school budget.
The Valley Partnership, is at the end of a three-year program, funded by an annual grant of $329,000. Without the matching funds the program is at risk and over 20 people lose their paid volunteer positions.
Fundraising efforts are still trying to raise $55,000 by August 3rd to meet the target start-up date. The sponsors are asking for donations by philanthropists and charitable institutions to help save this English language program.
Previously, participating local schools paid up to $5,000 totaling $105,000. Recent school budget cuts slashed those funds. This year none of the schools have program allowances.
The Valley Partnership is the local sponsor of the AmeriCorps team. A collaboration of seven schools won a first-time award of $50,000 from the Anderson Children’s Foundation in the Coachella Valley, cutting in half the matching amount needed by the community schools, leaving the program only about $55,000 shy of the essential funding objective.
AmeriCorps is the “Peace Corps” in America. Sustained by community service members, this organization fulfills a vital mission doing different kinds of work all across the country. The Valley Partnership uses their AmeriCorps team focusing on literacy in English language skills from K – 3rd grade.
Twenty-one AmeriCorps members tutor students to aid in increasing reading proficiency and English fluency at seven elementary schools in the Coachella Valley.
“It makes me proud to know that at the beginning of the year I started working with children who couldn’t read. Some even had trouble sounding a word,” said Esmeralda Castro, a recent AmeriCorp graduate.
“Now, they read with no problem. The changes in these children have been amazing,” Castro said.
Valley philanthropists, angels and friends of community services are asked to step forward to help this very important program.
Many of these children benefiting from the program will become well integrated into American society with vital language skills.
To help please contact Cynthia Radley, Executive Director of The Valley Partnership at 760-776-5555 or c.radley@thevalleypartnership.org
My mother, although born in the U.S., didn't speak English until she went to school. That is the way it was. And we were a stronger country because of that.
Now, these kids are mollycoddled throughout. And they don't learn English fluency. They don't even know how to speak their dominant language correctly, let alone read or write it.
The primary emphasis on these program is money. The schools get more money per student for bi-lingual ed. than they get for regular ed.
Yes, paid volunteers is an interesting concept.
Look for schools everywhere to be cutting back some programs. Schools’ budgets have been blown to smithereens by fuel prices. Districts can either run bus routes all day long, w/ high-priced diesel, no less, or they can have special this-and-that programs. I have seen instances where two employees (one certified and one classified) have been deployed just to shepherd one spastic kid all day long. Federal legislation, don’tcha know. Multiply that times a dozen less-severe cases per district, and we are talking a quarter of a million dollars.
Now, schools can either educate (more or less), or they can spend millions on baby-sitting special needs. With present fuel cost budget crunches, they cannot do both. I expect the liberal education community will be crying to the liberal Congress for immediate relief. That way, they can ratchet up their funding (and, as we all know, increases are always permanent).
It should get interesting.
Oh my! Twenty+ PAID volunteers may lose their jobs. Tears are flooding my keyboard. I noticed there was no mention of whose kids these are. Dare we say “illegal immigrants” anchors babies?
In Eastern Nevada we have UNPAID volunteers (mostly retireds) doing the same work. We have a few whites with attitudes but the majority are Spanish, which none of us speak. What we do is sit down with the kids and have them read English to us, and then explain a word when they stumble.
We deal with 5th graders who read at a third grade or lower level. By the end of the semester the vast majority are up to speed.
The biggest kick is to tell the kids to break up the words into sounds and then spell each sound (phonetics). It is amazing how quickly they pick things up. Two problems: The first is that some are illiterate in their own language. The second is that some fathers won't let the kids read or speak English at home. "Spanish is their heritage." they are told. (The kids succeed despite their dads.)
I say they need a little more help in Geography then English or Spanish.
The annexation of California with the help of American citizens with a mental disorder, LIBERALS!
My mom didn’t speak English when she started kindergarten, either. The difference now is that the classroom was not full of other kids who spoke her language. Many studies demonstrate that English learning goes down when the concentration of speakers of one other language goes up.
Schools used to deal with that by basically outlawing speaking Spanish at school. But that hurt the kids’ feelings, so now that’s out the door.
FR is getting very hard to figure out these days. On another thread, they are arguing that convicted felons should not have their rights curtailed once they are out of prison but still on parole.
From the reactions here, it sounds like no one wants English learning.
Not at all. You are way off. You see, the class this thread is talking about exists because these kids are being TAUGHT IN SPANISH.
THAT is what we are railing against. There should be no "English as second language" clases because there should be no NEED for English as a second language. If these kids can't learn in school in ENGLISH, they do not belong in an American school at all.
The situation is the SAME as getting people on FR to use HTML and standardized style in their POSTS. No one said people should be kicked off FR because they (you) don't know HTML or use proper posting style.
That is why FR set up the HTML sandbox, a program that has been in existence on FR for eight years.
I agree with English emersion. That is how it is done in China. All courses are taught in Chinese even though everyone speaks English. Students that do not speak Chinese go into intensive classes to learn Chinese before going to regular classes.
And Chinese people coming here whose English is not good enough to take courses in English must learn English quickly.
The question is, what do you do to get the system the way you want it?
In the mean time, there are kids that want to learn English and people that want to teach it to them. Again, why would you be opposed to that?
You BORE me.
That’s because you don’t want to examine your pre-concieved notions on an issue.
No, it’s because you are a petty person.
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