An e-mail to the School Board

The recent school board elections in your district (the Isla Verde Unified School District in Northern California) signalled a major change in the community. For one thing, the demographics of the school district have shifted significantly. While it continues to serve a primarily middle-class and professional population who are overwhelmingly from native English-speaking backgrounds, recent world events have caused an influx of refugees in part because of the actions of local charitable and religious organizations. In addition, a local military base that was closed five years ago has been converted into low-income housing, and has drawn a substantial group of Spanish-speaking (mainly from Mexico but about of quarter of them from other central American countries) as well as Tongan and Samoan families. Because the base installation falls within the school district boundaries, there has been a significant increase in students from these backgrounds.

The demographic changes have fuelled considerable local political controversy, one result of which was a highly contested school board election that resulted in new board members for 3 out of the 5 seats. The two incumbent seats represent traditional liberal perspectives sympathetic to immigrants at an abstract level, but with little experience in dealing with language minority populations -- the district has had only a small (about 2%) group of children of foreign professionals in the computer and biotechnology industries. The three new seats are made up of the following:

The first school board meeting of the year is about to take place next Tuesday, and one of the agenda items is a discussion of programs and policies for English learners. You are concerned that the school board lacks even the most basic information on the legal rights of these students. Based on what you know from the readings, write an e-mail memorandum to the school board outlining the district's responsibilities under Federal law to educate these students. The note should be short -- no more than 800 words -- people don't read long e-mails. Be sure to give them the gist of the major federal court decisions as well as a sense of where they should turn for additional information. Try to be creative in making the information as appealing to the board members as possible!

Resources

  1. Crawford, Chapters 1-2.
  2. Lau v. Nichols.
  3. Revisiting the Lau Decision: 20 Years After. ARC Associates. Reflections by Ling-Chi Wang, Edward Steinman, and Edward De Avila.
  4. Hakuta, K. Testimony to U. S. Civil Rights Commission.

Additional Resources:

  1. Some key concepts (from the Office for Civil Rights website).
  2. Castaneda v. Pickard (this is dense reading. This case is succinctly covered in Crawford, but is supplied here as reference because of the importance and elegance of the decision.)
  3. OCR Website on LEP Resources.