By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Parents do not show up at Highland Elementary School merely to drop off students.

On a recent morning, one mother arrived seeking help in filling out a job application. Another needed a Spanish speaker for a teacher conference about missed homework. Someone else wanted to know how to get health insurance for her son. Twenty parents waited in the computer lab for a class that would cover little more than how to turn the machines on and off.

This year, for the first time, more than half the students at the Silver Spring school spoke limited English. It's a milestone for the school and for the Montgomery County school system, where the term "English language learners" was seldom heard before the middle of the last decade.

The population of students learning English is rising briskly in school systems in the Washington suburbs. Elementary school students with limited English proficiency (LEP) now number 20,000 in Fairfax, 10,000 in Montgomery, 9,000 in Prince William and 8,000 in Prince George's counties. Just seven years ago, those four counties accounted for 23,000 elementary-grade LEP students.

These newest LEP students are largely U.S. citizens, born within a few miles of their school but raised in homes where English is not spoken.

"You don't need English here to go to the bank or to go to the Giant," said Principal Raymond Myrtle, whose school sits near the multicultural mecca of downtown Wheaton.

To serve a population of English learners that has quadrupled in eight years, Myrtle and his staff at Highland have transformed a sleepy neighborhood school into a bustling hub of civic life, with weekend soccer tournaments, evening English classes, after-school tutoring and an ensemble of school-based community services such as housing assistance and mental health counseling. In the neighborhood bounded by Veirs Mill and Randolph roads and Connecticut and Georgia avenues, there is no more popular destination than the school.

"Where do you put the floppy? Remember?" asked Claudia Silva, the Salvadoran-born parent community coordinator, leading 20 parents in a computer class on a recent morning. "Look for a symbol of a W that stands for Word."

Silva is one of eight Spanish-speaking staff members at Highland Elementary. She is a beacon to hundreds of parents from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and other Central and South American nations.

More than three-quarters of Highland families qualify for subsidized meals. Within the immigrant population, fathers typically work in construction or landscaping; mothers work as nannies or at restaurants or stay home with their children. Families sometimes live three or four to a home. Rent in the area starts at $300 for a room, $600 to $800 for a basement. Almost no one in the immigrant community receives welfare, according to social workers and others at the school who serve the foreign-born.

Housing is cheaper in Adelphi and Hyattsville, Prince George's suburbs with similar concentrations of Latin American immigrants. But crime seems to be getting worse in those communities, parents say, while the neighborhood around Highland seems to be getting better. Parents say they feel safe leaving children outdoors. School leaders say it's been a long time since they have seen gang slogans on student notebooks.

Parents pay higher rents to have access to what they believe is a superior school.

There are six public schools in Maryland where half or more students are identified as LEP. Among them, only Highland met this year's statewide goal of 67.5 percent reading proficiency for students of limited English ability on the Maryland School Assessment. Four other schools missed the target by at least 10 points. (One school, a primary school, does not give statewide tests.)

"I could find a better house in Prince George's," said Elsi Flores, a mother of two at Highland. "But the education here is better, I think."

Five years ago, when Myrtle arrived, Highland was in danger of "restructuring" by the state education department after several years of low test scores. In 2003, just five of 53 LEP students who took the statewide exam rated proficient in reading. This year, 88 of 116 LEP students rated proficient, a 76 percent pass rate. Students in seven other demographic subgroups did as well or better.

The classroom approach at Highland is a particularly vigorous model of English for Speakers of Other Languages, a standard immersion program that teaches students the language as they learn their academics. English language learners are taught in regular classrooms, with lessons delivered entirely in English. Nine trained ESOL teachers help students using verbal and visual cues.

"Mouse -- mouse -- m-m-m," said Marva Nieves, an ESOL teacher, working with a pair of first-grade students on a recent morning. "You have to move your lips to get the sounds. Okay?" The boys worked from small bags filled with flashcards of words they had learned in a previous lesson.

Students often arrive at Highland unable to read, write or speak fluently in Spanish or English. In response, the school has placed a growing emphasis on pre-kindergarten and Head Start, which, as of this year, is a full-day program. Sixty of this year's 97 kindergartners attended pre-K programs at Highland.

Parent participation at Back to School Night has risen from about 20 percent five years ago to 80 percent today. The turning point came when school employees began telephoning each family rather than send form letters home.

Highland offers classes for parents, not just in English and computers but also in math and study skills, because many parents "don't even know how to begin" to help their children with homework, said Jessica Tierney, who works at the school in a multi-agency program called Linkages to Learning.

There is another school-based program called Identity, in recognition that "a lot of these families have lost their identities as Salvadoran families," Myrtle said, "but they haven't quite reinvented themselves as Americans."