For decades, the fruits of these endless rows of trees have brought migratory laborers, mostly Hispanic, to the Wenatchee, Columbia, and Yakima valleys for the harvest. Once, those farmworkers moved on at harvest's end. While many still migrate with the seasons, others are settling into permanent jobs in communities up and down the valleys--Wenatchee and Wapato, Sunnyside and Pateros, Zillah and Brewster. As those families have settled, area schools have seen their Hispanic enrollments increase dramatically.
"One of the problems for Central Washington's school districts is that as the number of Hispanic students has increased over the years, we haven't had Hispanic teachers coming in at the same rate," says Dr. Ed Rousculp, chair of the department of undergraduate education at Heritage College in Toppenish, a few miles southeast of Yakima. In the past, he says, bilingual and bicultural teachers frequently were hired from Texas and other states, but lacking family ties and roots in the community, they seldom stayed.
The need for Spanish-speaking teachers in Central Washington's school districts was nearing crisis proportions in 1993. That's when the North Central Educational Service District (ESD), with financial support from the state education department, approached Heritage College for help in finding and certifying bilingual paraprofessionals in a teacher-training program called the Priority Hispanic Certification Program. The aim of the project was to certify paraprofessionals--parapros--who were already working in the schools as teacher's aides. This new cadre of educators would help fill the acute need for bilingual teachers in rural schools, where Hispanic children often struggle and frequently fail without help in overcoming language and cultural barriers.
Heritage College put out a call among Central Washington's school districts for bilingual paraprofessionals with an associate's degree or its equivalent who were interested in earning a bachelor's degree in elementary education along with an endorsement in bilingual education. When that original call didn't turn up enough qualified parapros, the college ran an ad in El Mundo, a local Spanish-language newspaper, and loosened the requirements to broaden the pool of applicants.
ONE RECENT DECEMBER SATURDAY, the 13 men and women who eventually enrolled in the program gather in the library in Wenatchee's Foothills Middle School. Despite the cold and grey outside, instructor Millie Watkins and her class are having a festive day. It's the last class of the quarter for Watkins' bilingual students. They have worked hard, and today they joke and laugh, reviewing what they've learned and taking stock of the circumstances that brought them to this classroom and, for several, to this country, some from as far away as Guatemala and Ecuador.
"I came to the USA following a dream to learn the English language," says Alfonso Lopez, a 33-year-old from Mexico who taught elementary school for five years before moving to the United States. "I did other jobs here--working in orchards and on a cattle ranch--but one day I decided to come back to school when I heard about this program."
For most of these students, 20 percent of tuition comes from the grant, and 40 percent comes from the school districts or education agencies that employ them. The balance is made up from various other financial-aid sources and from the students themselves, most of whom work full-time.
Lopez expresses his gratitude to Heritage for a program that is structured around the realities of working life. "We take classes on weekends," he says, "which is what we needed."
Although he had been a teacher in Mexico for five years, Lopez could not automatically become a professional teacher when he moved to the United States, even if he had been bilingual at the time. (Because a number of the program participants lacked English skills when they began, linguistic assistance was built into the program). As Watkins points out, the requirements for teacher certification differ greatly between the United States and Mexico, and transfer of certification is not automatic, no matter how much experience a teacher has.
"We're taking a skill that they already possess and building it into the American education system," says Watkins, who besides being an instructor is migrant education supervisor at the North Central ESD. "They already know what teaching is all about."
Lopez, who had earned a master's degree in social science from the Escuela Normal Superior de Oaxaca, was working as a manager on a cattle ranch in Ellensburg when he saw the newspaper ad. His original goal in coming to America had been to learn English so that he could teach a foreign language back home. But once he got here, he couldn't afford to attend classes. When he heard about the Priority program, Lopez quit his job and moved with his wife and two children to Wenatchee.
Not only was he accepted into the program, but he quickly landed a job as a teacher's aide at Wenatchee's Lincoln Elementary School, whose enrollment is nearly 45 percent percent Hispanic. Though Lopez and his classmates won't finish their two-and-a-half-year program until this summer, another Wenatchee school, Lewis and Clark Elementary--with 25 percent Hispanic students and in desperate need of a full-time bilingual teacher--has already offered him a teaching position.
Prospects look excellent for his classmates, too. "Administrators regularly call and ask æwhen will those students be finished?'" says Rousculp.
Gioconda Jackson had been studying marketing when she left her native Ecuador to join her sister in Wenatchee, where she planned to finish her degree. Teaching had not been her goal, but, she says: "I saw kids who came from Mexico and knew nothing about English. I felt so sorry for them because I could see myself in them. So I put my marketing career aside and began to think about becoming a teacher."
The 32-year-old Jackson has been working toward her associate of arts degree and teacher certification while working for Watkins at the ESD. "It's been one of the biggest jobs of my life to go to class during my lunch hour to get my AA, and then to the school every weekend to get my certification," she says. "But I think it's worth it."
Jackson believes that the difficulty of being a Hispanic child in America's schools is underestimated. "Sometimes, we don't realize how much culture shock there is when kids move to the United States," she says. "Many people believe they just have to deal with the language. It's not true."
Jackson says children are under intense pressure not only to learn English and academic content but also to rapidly adapt to an alien culture. "It's more than just understanding English: It's understanding the way people live," asserts Jackson, who says her ability to empathize will be an asset. "I can understand their fears."
The Priority Hispanic Certification Program's mission of helping language-minority children ties in closely with the college's founding philosophy. Heritage, which grew out of a Native American outreach program of Fort Wright, a small Catholic liberal arts college in Spokane, is dedicated to bringing quality higher education to "diverse populations" in rural areas. Since its founding 14 years ago, the college has focused on addressing the educational needs of Central Washington adults who, because they are bound by work and family responsibilities to a rural locale, would otherwise be unable to pursue quality higher education. Since 1982, when 85 students attended classes in a caretaker's cottage or under a sycamore tree, the college has grown to serve more than 1,000 student at its 20 acres in Toppenish and at a satellite campus at Omak. Academic offerings include four master's programs in education.
DESPITE "GROWING UP," HERITAGE HAS RETAINED ITS PRIME DIRECTIVE. Of about 650 undergraduate students, more than half at the Toppenish campus are people of color: about 30 percent Hispanic and 20 percent Native American. Most are the first in their family to attend college. More than half fall below the poverty level. Many are farmworkers and single mothers. Women make up 70 percent of the student body, whose average age is 33.
To accommodate its student body, Heritage offers classes in many communities, often in the evening or on the weekend. On the same December Saturday that Millie Watkins meets with her Priority students in Wenatchee, for example, Dr. Yolanda Jaini, director of complex instruction at Heritage, is teaching an English as a Second Language (ESL) course across the Columbia River in East Wenatchee. The 10 graduate students are learning how to be innovators in conveying basic concepts to children whose English is weak or nonexistent. They experiment with ways of delivering instructions, often relying on visual presentations such as diagrams on computer screens. Jaini rarely lectures, more often giving her students key concepts and acting as a facilitator to draw from them the meaning and application of their lessons. During the process of encouraging students to find their own way through instruction--a method Jaini calls "scaffolding"--students receive support from the instructor, but only when they get stuck and only as much as they need to proceed independently. In this way, Jaini says, students assume more responsibility for their learning.
These classes, in which students learn from each other instead of receiving knowledge solely from the instructor, help build what Heritage and other progressive educational institutions call "learning communities." Students in a common field constitute "cohorts" or "cadres" that will go through the entire program together, forming networks that will extend beyond their education into their careers.
The Priority program and the regular curriculum at Heritage may have different immediate goals, but both will benefit children whose first or only language is something other than English. The graduate students' training in ESL is not finished once they complete the ESL class. Rather, effective methods of teaching language-minority students will be a recurring theme and a very substantial part of their education at Heritage, Jaini says.
DEALING WITH LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY in schoolchildren would not be such a big concern at Heritage if the solution were simply a matter of teaching English better or faster. But the issue goes much deeper than vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax, according to Dr. Pat Whitfield, dean of the division of education and psychology at Heritage. "Teachers need to be looking at the whole child and not just how well he or she speaks English," she says. "The opportunity to read and write in their own language is what will enable them to excel later on. Every child has a culture that has worth. If a child's frame of reference is not the same as ours, we have to recognize what that frame of reference is."
Heritage has grown quickly, a fact that speaks to the ongoing needs of the communities it serves. Rousculp and Watkins would like to see the Priority program continue and certify another group of bilingual teachers. But for that to happen, a new base source of funding would have to be identified. Despite the continued need, Rousculp wants to be sure that by the time work is begun on funding another group of students, there will be a large and highly qualified pool of parapros to recruit. So for now, Alfonso Lopez, Gioconda Jackson, and their fellow students are a unique graduating class.
"It's a dream we will keep forever," says Jackson. "We will always have this."
Matthew Fleagle is a freelance writer who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. 
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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