In a caption on Page 1B of most of yesterday's editions, th names Bernarette Dumorin and Yang Kim were transposed in a photograph that accompanied a story about a Howard County public school program for students who do not speak English.
* The Sun regrets the error.
Though it boasts some of Maryland's best-funded, best-performing schools, Howard County's educational system has failed to keep up with the growing number of students who don't speak English, advocates for the students say.
In a six-year period ending in 1992, the number of non-English speakers in county schools nearly quadrupled, to 431. In 1992-1993, only three other Maryland school systems -- Montgomery County, Prince George's County and Baltimore -- had more students who didn't speak English.
That growth has swamped Howard County's 12-member staff of specialists assigned to work with students who come to school speaking Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, French, Russian and a variety of other languages.
Particularly hard hit are the 362 elementary and middle school students whose instruction falls short of the half-day of English classes provided to high school students each day. The students and their teachers say they're frustrated.
In some classrooms, regular teachers ill-equipped to deal with non-English speakers assign make-work projects, biding their time until the day a specialist is available.
Some young children are unable to ask directions to the restroom when they feel ill. And students who have only begun to learn English find themselves routinely bumped from language programs long before they're ready because those seats are needed for new arrivals.
Students who entered school speaking little English tell of classes in which they were largely ignored, and of classmates who taunt them.
"I couldn't understand the language, what they were saying," recalls Helen Parks, an eighth-grader at Ellicott Mills Middle School who arrived from Korea when she was in sixth grade. "I didn't know what was going on. It took a long time, but I slowly understood -- word by word."
Wilde Lake High School sophomore Eva Fields, who spoke only Spanish when she arrived from El Salvador more than three years ago, says she felt left out many times.
"Sometimes, I wanted to talk or ask the teacher questions, but I couldn't, so I just sat in class," says Eva, who got five hours a week of language instruction in middle school. "Sometimes, [teachers] give me work, but I didn't know how to do it."
It's no wonder they have a hard time, says Fred Pausch, head of the Columbia-based Up With Kids Inc., a nonprofit group that works with students who know little English.
"They can't talk to the teachers. They can't talk to the students. They just sit there."
"We're giving them a bad image of our society and our culture. I think we owe it to them and to ourselves to do something about it," he said.
Only 45 minutes a week
Critics say the school system has not allocated enough money or attention to what is known as the English for Speakers of Other Languages, or ESOL, program. Although the county spends about $775,000 a year on ESOL -- roughly $1,800 for each student in the program -- it spends more than $20 million a year, or three times as much per pupil, on its 3,600 special education students.
ESOL "has never been funded at a level appropriate to the intense need of the students," says Pat Hatch, director of the Columbia-based Foreign Born Information and Referral Network.
"If I had a deaf student, I would have someone sitting next to that student all day long. I have a student who speaks not a word of English, and that student gets help 45 minutes -- not a day, but a week."
Celeste Carr, the school system's foreign language supervisor, acknowledges that there are too many students for the system's ESOL teachers.
"As small as it is, we are doing as much as we can," she says. "But we're overwhelmed by the numbers. We're not providing as much services as we need."
Top school officials say they're sympathetic but argue that even a wealthy district such as the Howard County one can't do everything.
"The reality of a public school system is it must meet the needs of students as best they can within realistic budget constraints," says Dana Hanna, the school board chairman.
He agrees that ESOL "staffing is inadequate" but adds, "There are numerous areas where we are inadequately staffed to address specific needs such as that."
Even so, other school districts that spend less overall on a per-pupil basis than Howard County are doing more for their ESOL populations.
Baltimore County's 'clusters'
In Baltimore County, which spends $6,200 per student system-wide compared with Howard's $6,500, more than 300 non-English-speaking students in middle and high school attend cluster" schools where they spend up to the entire day in specialized English classes.
Susan Spinnato, Baltimore County's ESOL coordinator, says the cluster schools provide a haven for immigrant children. "I think the students and the parents are very pleased with it," she says.
In addition, there is a language teacher assigned all day at every elementary school in Baltimore County with more than 20 ESOL students.
In Howard County, by contrast, schools that have more than 20 students have language teachers on hand half a day. Only high (( school students are sent to a school where they get intensive language instruction, and just for half a day.
In Baltimore City, which spends $5,200 per student system-wide, ESOL teachers are stationed full time at schools where there are at least 20 non-English-speaking students. Those who attend schools without an ESOL teacher are bused to a school where there is one.
The city school system last year began a mandatory program in which new students must specify their home languages when they enroll at school. In this way, school officials are able to determine better whether the students need help in speaking English.
"We've made tremendous progress in the last two years," says Jose Torres, who heads the city's ESOL program. "I consider ours one of the best in the area. We feel we have a very solid program, and we're still surprised we don't have more students."
Howard County school officials say they've made progress. Superintendent Michael E. Hickey notes that the current 12-member ESOL staff is 80 percent larger than it was six years ago -- a proportionately larger increase than for other programs.
"It's a matter of more program needs than we have resources to fully meet," he says.
He pledges that the system will do better but warns, "I just don't know if we can keep up with the people who think [they know] what the appropriate standards are."
Nationwide problem
Howard's predicament mirrors that of the nation. The number of students who speak little or no English grew by 69 percent, to 2.5 million from 1985 to 1992, according to the Alexandria, Va.-based Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
In Maryland, the number of non-English speakers jumped 72 percent, to 12,100 students.
More than half of those students live in Montgomery County, where the school system is spending $11 million on them this year.
In the 1992-1993 school year, Anne Arundel County had 291 non-English-speaking students; Baltimore City, 462; Baltimore County, 1,310; Carroll County, 34; and Harford County, 91, state figures show.
In Howard County, more than half of the 431 students who speak little or no English are from Asian countries. Thirty-four percent speak Korean, 10 percent Chinese and 9 percent Vietnamese.
Fifteen percent speak Spanish, 6 percent French and 5 percent Russian. The rest have first languages that include Arabic, Farsi, Polish and Turkish.
Moreover, an increasing number come to school unable to read or write in their native language.
Federal law requires that school systems provide "adequate assistance" to students with limited English proficiency so that they can perform successfully in school.
But the definition of "adequate assistance" has never been tested, says Susan Helm Smith, a foreign-language learning specialist for the state Department of Education.
Though teachers and parents say that Howard County's ESOL program does excellent work with individual students, especially high school, they agree that the program falls short for younger students.
To deal with such problems, the school system staff recently suggested adding teachers and giving students more intensive English instruction in elementary and middle school, where only some students receive extensive daily language instruction.
Students are bused
High school ESOL students are pulled out of their schools each day and bused to the Howard School of Technology, where they spend half of each day in English classes.
Middle school students "need to see somebody on a daily basis, not as a pull-out program where they're missing additional instruction in academic classes," Ms. Carr says.
Board members did agree to increase by three the number of ESOL teachers next school year. And board Vice Chairwoman Susan Cook said she would like school administrators to study a proposal for an ESOL teacher at every school that needs it.
"I don't think we have met their needs," she says of youngsters with limited English. "These students need more than what we have been giving them."