FifthColumn
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- Jan 11, 2011
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September 13, 2010|By Tara Malone, Tribune reporter
With his navy slacks and dress shirt still creased from his mother's iron, 4-year-old Edenzoe Diaz reported for his first day of preschool to learn his letters in English and Spanish.
He got his first lesson as he stepped into the classroom. Teacher Tania Miranda asked her newest student to copy the letters of his name onto an attendance sheet.
"Primero, esta letra," Miranda said, pointing to the "E" on his nametag.
Edenzoe speaks no English, his mother said. But in this bilingual classroom at Chicago's Edwards Center for Young Learners a public school in the shadow of Midway Airport he will receive the same support that for years has been offered starting in kindergarten.
As the school year begins, Illinois becomes the first state to mandate that public schools with preschool programs offer a bilingual education to 3- and 4-year-olds who don't speak English.
Under the new regulations, school officials must determine whether students speak another language at home and measure how well they speak and understand English. They then must offer those who need it a seat in a bilingual preschool class, where they study basic academic skills in their native language as they learn English.
But from Carpentersville to Champaign, local school districts are hurrying to comply with the requirements that come without additional funding, even as they brace for another year of dwindling reserves and funding delays.
"It seems as though this is just creating a problem unnecessarily," said Superintendent Roger Prosise, of Diamond Lake School District 76, where nearly a quarter of the district's 1,170 students are new to English.
Calling preschool the new front door to the school system, education experts say the change could help to narrow the academic divide.
"If you start early, there's a very good promise that you will not have achievement-gap issues later on," said Eugene Garcia, an education professor at Arizona State University and former chair of the National Task Force for the Early Education of Hispanics. "What Illinois has done is take the lead in the state policy arena."
The mandate covers 585 preschool programs run and funded by public districts, serving about 85,000 students, state officials said. It stems from a 2009 state law that extended bilingual services to preschool. The new rules laid out what was expected.
With the state of Illinois being one of the worst in creating "dummy factories" full of non-English speaking children from the third world, and running up a bill for ridiculous classes to appease LA RAZA, you Americans will soon be faced with the real question of
"Who do our American politicians work for?"
and
"Why am I paying to educate the third world?"