Lessons Far From Home

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Lessons of an Imported Teacher

Prince George's County needed teachers. Mabel Ventura left the Philippines to fill the gap -- and earn a paycheck to help her family back in Manila.

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Mabel closed the book and asked for quiet. An aide moved the kicker beside her.

This class, with about 20 first-graders, was the smallest that Mabel had ever taught. At the school where she had worked in Manila, classes averaged about 45 students. Mabel was co-teaching this class with Lee Ann Franco-Colon, a 21-year-old freshly graduated from college in Puerto Rico.

Mabel had been warned that she would be teaching challenging students. Even so, the class was squirmier and louder than all of her previous ones put together. She took a breath and moved on with the shark book. The whale shark, she read, eats smaller fish. It is a good hunter because it can smell something as far as one mile away.

One student wanted to know whether that was the distance from the school to his home.

Another boy had an idea: "From here to the Philippines."

Mabel smiled and flipped the page. "Let's find out," she said.

She had told the class on the first day of school that she had traveled here from the Philippines. Taking out a globe, she had spun it around to show them the distance between Maryland and her home.

THE DAY SHE LEFT, MABEL DIDN'T LET HER CHILDREN ACCOMPANY HER TO THE AIRPORT; she didn't want them to see her departure. Instead, she got them ready for school as if it were any other day. Abbey, 19, kept hugging her and lingered until Mabel warned her that she would be late for college. Liel, 13, wouldn't look straight at Mabel. Her youngest and only son, 10-year-old Roee, was silent.

Mabel moved through the morning in a fog, tired from the whirlwind preparations for the trip and still not believing that she would actually be leaving. Surely something would go wrong. Her husband, Gary, drove her to the airport. Once on the plane, she melted into tears. Nearly every night of that first week, she said, she would "cry it out." She had to keep telling herself to focus on her family's future.

"Here, even if you are not working so hard, you are paid more," she said. "In the Philippines, you are paid little, even if you are working hard."

In Prince George's, the starting teacher's salary is $43,481 -- almost 10 times what the same teacher would make in the Philippines. Many Filipinos, like Mabel, can make much more here because of their years of experience. Salaries for someone with two decades of experience and a master's degree can be more than $80,000.

Perhaps most important, the teachers get a shot at becoming Americans. If they perform well for three years, the county will sponsor them for a green card, or permanent residency. It can take years for them to actually get the card and, later, citizenship, because of the government backlog. But theirs is a much easier path to the United States than that of many other immigrants. They don't have to come here illegally or win a visa lottery. They just have to do their jobs.