Parents say English speakers are being wrongly assigned

Boston Public Schools has revamped its process for assessing whether students need English language learner services, with mixed results, according to several parents.

Marisol Negron wasn’t sure what to make of the check box on her son’s Boston Public Schools student enrollment form. The simple question, “Is any language other than English spoken at home?” had any number of implications. Would it improve her then-three-year-old son’s chances of obtaining a spot in a two-way bilingual school? Or would it trigger unnecessary and time-consuming language assessment for a child who already is English-fluent?

Negron, who is an assistant professor of American Studies and Latino Studies at UMass Boston, and her husband Joel Dawson, an electrical engineer, speak to their son in English and Spanish. Negron checked the box, a decision she soon came to regret.

“Once I checked the box, I couldn’t go back and un-check it,” she says.

As it turned out, the simple act of checking that box condemned Negron to ten months in a bureaucratic Hades. As Negron soon learned, a “yes” response on that question triggers an automatic English language proficiency assessment. While the assessment is supposed to happen at BPS Welcome Centers when students are being registered, they often take months to schedule.

“Once you submit the form for pre-registration, you’re locked in,” says Citywide Parents Council representative Angie Camacho, whose son was labeled an English language learner and assigned to an English language class at the dual-language Hurley K-8 school in the South End after she checked the “language other than English spoken at home” box. “I wanted him in Spanish classes. I can support his English skills, but not his Spanish skills.”

The check box for determining whether languages other than English are spoken at home was added to the registration process after a federal investigation found that BPS was routinely denying services to children in need of ELL services. As part of a 2012 settlement agreement, the school department began making more concerted efforts to assess students’ English proficiency.

“In accordance with state and federal mandates, including the 2012 Successor Settlement Agreement regarding ELLs between Boston Public Schools and U.S. Department of Justice, Boston Public Schools provides a home language survey for parents to identify English Language Learners at the time of school registration,” reads a statement BPS officials emailed to the Banner. “Based upon answers provided in the survey, students may be assessed to determine whether they are eligible for language services and supports. Students who are identified as ELLs will receive language services until they meet exit criteria, which includes classroom performance and results of mandated tests, including ACCESS for ELLs and MCAS.”

Overkill?

The department’s efforts to comply with the DOJ consent decree may have gone too far, says Kim Janey, a senior project director at Massachusetts Advocates for Children.

“In their attempt to catch kids who need services, they may be catching kids who don’t,” she said.

“It’s a challenge school districts across the country are facing,” Negron says. “Many are over-identifying or under-identifying students.”

Negron said she and her husband did not want their son to have to undergo the language assessment, or to be classified as an English language learner.

“We were concerned that if he inputted syntax from Spanish into English, it would be considered a deficiency rather than evidence of language contact,” she said.

Negron immediately went about trying to rectify her son’s designation, initially going through the painstaking process of determining with whom she could speak. She thought she had lucked out when she secured a meeting with an official in the English Language Learners Office, who instructed them to take up the issue at the Hernandez school. At the Hernandez school, they were instructed to take up the issue with the ELL office.

But by then, the trail went cold.

“We weren’t getting our phone calls returned,” she said. “They weren’t answering our emails. It took months.”

For many weeks, Negron and Dawson made calls several times a week, in an ultimately fruitless quest to reverse the designation.

Negron said the experience taught her a lesson about the difficulty of dealing with the BPS bureaucracy.

“It’s not just about my kid,” she said. “For us, it was also about how our students being assessed. We have jobs where we can take off in the middle of the day. We were able to email and make calls many times a day. Not everyone can do that.”

For the first half of the year, Negron and Dawson’s son was in an English instruction class, rather than a class with instruction in Spanish. One compelling reason Negron and other parents select the Hernandez is so that their English-speaking children can learn Spanish. In December, the ELL office conducted a language assessment. In January, the office deemed him English proficient and he was placed in a Spanish language classroom.

“Ultimately, we know that our son is going to be okay,” Negron said. “He has two parents who have the social capital to do the best we can within this system. He’s going to be okay at the Hernandez.”