House of Zathras

My new Haitian student? Gone. Without my being able to say goodbye.

Seems the ‘evaluator’ for the ‘ESOL’ (English for Speakers of Other Languages) deemed my student’s older brother ‘not proficient’ in English. So now they’re going to be bussed out of their home neighborhood to a school that ‘specializes’ in the remediation of the English language. Among mainly children who speak Spanish and Vietnamese. Yeah, that will be really good for building their English. These kids aren’t speaking French/Haitian/Creole. Accented English yes, with different cultural implications. But supposedly their English will improve by being among non-English speakers!!!!

And get this…when this evaluator came to the school to screen my student, I was asking her about some situations I’d experienced with my student (see my previous post). The woman said she had no idea. I said something to the effect of the belief systems being a combination of traditional African beliefs and Catholicism. She looked at me and said, “Well, you know more about it than I do.” And SHE made the decision that the boys would be better off at the other school to build their language skills.

Maybe it will. But these boys already spoke English AS THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE!!!!. My student was really opening up and interacting and laughing with the other students. He was asking and answering questions in class.

I am just heart-broken about this student leaving. I don’t think it was right what they did…I’m sure the cultural differences affected the outcome of the test…I’ve experienced that in California and in Texas.

And they called him into the office while we were at recess with no damn explanation. I call to check on him, and was told he’s gone. Just like that.

It ain’t right. And you know what else???? It’s FTE week. It’s the week we do a ‘special count’ to see how much funding schools get from the government. The more kids in ‘special services’, the more funding the district gets. I’m sure putting two kids into this ‘special’ program will get the district some extra money.

It’s a bunch of crap.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 10:05 pm and is filed under School Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.