Older Students Who Need Basics Pose Challenge

"We don't want to have an uneducated underclass here," said Karen Adkins-Hastings, a guidance counselor at South Lakes Transitional High School in Fairfax. "That's part of what [these programs] are all about."

In Montgomery, students such as Velasquez enroll in METS -- the Multidisciplinary, Education, Training and Support program -- for students 9 and older. Students are taught in smaller classes -- usually about 15 students -- by teachers who specialize in working with non-English, mostly Spanish, speakers. Teachers use a variety of strategies to reach students, including lots of visual aids and hand motions, in 50-minute sessions. Fairfax takes a similar approach, but students take 90-minute classes.

During a recent class at Gaithersburg High, where Velasquez is a freshman, Margaret VanBuskirk began the lesson by assigning students to write brief sentences on what they did over spring break. She asked the question slowly in English. When the students looked puzzled, she pantomimed eating, sleeping and other activities as suggestions. When students recognized an activity, she had them repeat it in English, first using present tense, then past tense, before writing it on a sheet of paper tacked to the white board.

Velasquez takes three 50-minute courses especially designed for METS students -- social studies, reading and math -- along with non-METS classes in science and math. Ideally, as he and his classmates gain more fluency in English, they will be moved into more advanced ESOL courses and then into regular high school classes.

But Velasquez's progress, like that of many newcomers, is slow. He is among VanBuskirk's better students -- he does his homework and comes to class every day. But after a year and four months in school, he has moved ahead only one grade level in math -- from second to third. His reading is improving, but he is still at primary grade level.

Alex Mendez was born in the United States, but he spent several years in El Salvador before returning to Gaithersburg seven months ago to live with his father. Like Velasquez, he is trying to learn English as well as an entirely different culture.

He said he will try to graduate from high school, but beyond learning English he doesn't have any specific goals.

"I like [Ms. VanBuskirk's class] because it feels like family," he said through a translator. "But the work is difficult because I don't understand English."

How well these programs work for older students such as Velasquez and Mendez is difficult to assess by standard measures, educators say. Montgomery doesn't track the number of METS students who move into mainstream English classes or graduate from high school. And in Fairfax, officials don't distinguish these students from regular ESOL kids.

However, an independent analysis of Montgomery's METS program released this year by the Latino Education Coalition, a collaborative of local groups concerned about the achievement of Latino students, painted a troubling picture. It found "numerous, serious shortfalls" and that older METS students "receive insufficient support within the school system and that not enough resources are channeled to support the success of these students."

At one high school, the study's authors found, seven of the 18 students enrolled in the METS program in the 2004-05 school year dropped out. Another school lost more than half of its METS kids.

"These are students that we believe [the school system] is missing," said Candace Kattar, executive director of Identity Inc., one of the agencies that did the study. Too often, she said, these kids are slipping through the cracks because their numbers are small and their parents don't know how to be advocates for them. With the number of Latino students in Montgomery growing -- from 12 percent of the student population a decade ago to 20 percent today -- the system can no longer afford to ignore their needs, she added.

Fairfax educators say about one-third of the 325 students who enroll in the Transitional High School program graduate and move to an alternative high school, where they can continue studying English and working toward a diploma. But administrators say that number can be misleading because it fails to account for students who move out of the area or who take the skills they've gained to get jobs.

Montgomery officials concede that more can be done for older METS students and have formed a task force to study new strategies to reach this population. One possibility: offering students vocational training in addition to academic instruction.

"I can't say we're always successful, but we're hopeful we can provide them with understanding of what their goals could be," said Lois Wions, program supervisor for ESOL Instruction for the Montgomery school system. "But we also have to be realistic with ourselves and our students. There's very little chance that in four years a student who is not literate is going to graduate from high school."

But Kattar and others say they are optimistic that something can be done for students such as Velasquez before they get discouraged and disappear from the system. Even if they don't earn a diploma, they may be able to pick up enough skills to survive, she said.

Velasquez said he has a simple goal: to do well in school, both for himself and his family's sake. And someday, he said, he hopes to master enough English to get a job helping other Latinos, just as his teachers at Gaithersburg have helped him.