That's the approach that several school districts in Eastern Oregon and Idaho are taking in an effort to bolster their bilingual teaching, counseling, and administrative staff with educators who are committed to the area. Dr. Jay Fuhriman, director of bilingual teacher education programs at Boise State College, has secured nearly $1 million in federal grants to help bilingual teachers to meet the needs of our students," Fuhriman says. "Our population is growing and we find that we need more and more teachers."
Northwest districts with the need for Spanish-English bilingual teachers have recruited unsuccessfully in Texas, New Mexico, California, Arizona, and other states, Fuhriman adds. "We decided that the best way--indeed, the only way--to get the teachers we need was to find young people who have an interest in teaching, but who could not afford it or did not have the background to pursue a degree."
In 1976, the first year of the grant, 27 people entered the program. Most of them were Hispanic, and most of them did not have a high school diploma or GED. "Twenty-one of them finished the program and became teachers," Fuhriman says. The grant has been renewed annually since then. It has helped more than 200 bilingual young people, most of them Hispanic, obtain their teaching degree.
The Ontario School District is among those participating in the program this year. The district has had little success recruiting bilingual teachers. "People are not necessarily interested in moving to Eastern Oregon," notes Carole Kitamura, personnel director at the 2,800-student K-12 district. "The whole issue of trying to grow our own is the only way we can see to increase our bilingual staff. We have a lot of diamonds in the rough--people who are already here and enhancing our community and schools. But they don't have a degree. It's nice to be able to take advantage of the great resources we have here. By helping local people get teaching degrees, we're creating a greater sense of family--a stronger community."
Ontario's schools, with a Hispanic student population close to 45 percent, have about 6 percent bilingual staff, Kitamura says. The district's goal is to increase its bilingual professional staff to 15 to 20 percent in the next five years.
Alfredo Ponce, an instructional aide at Lindbergh Elementary School in Ontario, is among those participating in the program. Ponce attended elementary school here, then graduated from high school in Hermiston, Oregon. He served in the Army and lived in Minnesota before returning to Ontario to participate in the program.
"The grant has opened the door for me to teach and help kids," Ponce says. "I see a lot of kids who think that muscle and force and brute strength is power. They don't understand that education is the real power."
Ponce says that it is important for children of Hispanic descent to learn to read and write English while retaining their Spanish language and culture. "If I can become a bilingual teacher, I can really help students," he says. "When I went to school, if you couldn't speak English you were kind of pushed off to the side. You can never forget who you are. I want to help students retain their Spanish langauge and to learn English and retain the two."
And that, notes Fuhriman, is the key to providing a bilingual education program that respects the culture of the language minority student while building a new framework for learning. "In a dual-language program, the language and the culture (of two languages) are both taught," he says. "You're looking at maintaining the native language and the native culture of the student while building a new language and a new culture for them. You can't really teach a language outside of its cultural context. You just lose the meaning. Language is probably the purest form of culture."
--Tony Kneidek
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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