honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, August 18, 2002

More students need help

By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

More than half of all Hawai'i public school children bring at least one type of educational disadvantage with them when they enter the classroom — limited English skills, high poverty or special education needs — and the number of these students is rising more rapidly than the general population.

Now, 50.6 percent of 183,000 public school children in the state require services beyond the norm, and 49.4 percent of students fall into the general education category, according to the Department of Education's most recent Superintendent's Report, an annual account of public school statistics and data that covers the 2000-01 school year.

Given that those disadvantaged children require services that cost an average of about twice as much as a regular education student, the task facing the Department of Education is steadily growing more expensive and more difficult, education officials say.

More than 11 percent, or 20,907 of Hawai'i's children have multiple disadvantages: a combination of poverty, limited English or special needs that experts say makes it even more difficult for them to succeed in school.

In the past decade:

  • The number of students considered high poverty has increased by more than 59 percent, from 46,522 to 74,558;
  • The number of students receiving special education services has increased by 106 percent, from 9,778 to 20,138;
  • The number of students who have limited English skills has increased 44 percent, from 8,861 to 12,837.

Thomas Gans, evaluation specialist and author of the Superintendent's Report, said that while a regular education student costs about $6,000 a year to educate, a disadvantaged student costs an average of $12,000 a year.

"That's part of the challenge we have as a public system," Gans said. "The 11.4 percent of students who have multiple disadvantages is where the real problems are: the students who are poor with limited English or poor with special education needs.

"Those just compound the problems. They come to the schools with needs, and it is the public school's charge to meet those needs."

But Gans said the number of students needing special services isn't surprising considering that Hawai'i is the 10th largest school district in the nation.

While the numbers of high poverty students and special education students dovetail with numbers from urban school districts on the Mainland, Gans said it is Hawai'i's population of students with limited English proficiency that stands out.

Hawai'i's immigrant and migrant students come mostly from Asia and the Pacific islands and speak a range of languages for which it is difficult to find qualified teachers. Most children come from the Philippines, Samoa and the Marshall Islands. Many school districts on the Mainland need only to look for Spanish-speaking teachers.

"If we have kids who come from cultures that are not well represented in our current U.S. culture, it presents a problem of where to find people who speak their language," Gans said.

Letters to parents regarding a new federal education law recently were translated into Chinese, Ilocano, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Marshallese, Samoan, Spanish, Tagalog, Tongan, Vietnamese and Visayan.

Teachers of English as a second language are in short supply in Hawai'i and across the country. Market Data Retrieval, a group that keeps national education statistics, has counted about 50,000 teachers in the United States, or about one for every 100 students who require services.

Alan Ramos, a specialist in English as a second language, said it isn't necessary for teachers to speak the language of the students, but it can shorten the time spent in ESL. Most children spend three to four years in ESL programs, he said.

Ramos said teachers have to know the techniques of teaching a second language, understand assessment testing and be culturally sensitive.

"I'm always looking for people that have bilingual ability, but not because of the language," he said. "It's because they can make the link faster between what the kid already knows with what the standards in Hawai'i are."

While Hawai'i officials expect the number of students coming from the Marshall Islands and Micronesia to increase because of free association compacts between the U.S. and those governments, it is difficult for the DOE to predict by how much the population of student with limited English skills will grow.

The special education population is expected to remain somewhat stable. The decade-long increase in the number of special education children can be attributed to the Felix consent decree, a federal court agreement to improve special education services to comply with law.

Fewer than 6 percent of children were identified as special education before the consent decree in the 1990s; the 11.4 percent identified now matches the national average.

As more children have been identified, costs have also risen to hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

While Hawai'i officials believe the number of special education children should remain in the area of 11 percent to12 percent, the number of high-poverty students is harder to predict.

"Unfortunately it's connected to our state economy," said Paul Ban, a DOE specialist who works with high-poverty schools.

The impact of Sept. 11 has not yet shown up in the DOE's statistics, so officials say that more students this year could qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Studies show that poverty is a major risk factor for poor performance in school. About 40 percent of the state's children qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program, a common measure of high poverty.

Poverty is most severe in Ka'u, Pahoa, Kea'au, Laupahoehoe, Moloka'i and Ni'ihau on the Neighbor Islands. On O'ahu, it is most severe in the Wai'anae, Nanakuli and Farrington communities, according to the report.

Sandy Ahu, principal of Nanakuli Elementary, said that with little industry and few jobs on the Leeward Coast, the poverty level has not improved over the years.

"They've got to go somewhere else to find work. That is a big disadvantage to our community," Ahu said. "Many of our parents also have not had positive experiences with school. We have to give the parents a positive experience and have them encourage their kids and teach them that education is a way out."

Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.