	July/Aug 2006
Swimming Lessons: How a Dedicated Teacher Changed Life for ELLs in a Rural Nebraska Town By Sarah Auerbach, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer Yanga Dolzhikova couldn't understand a word her classmates or teachers were saying. Despite having taken three years of English in Russia, twelve-year-old Yanga was ill-equipped for her first day of school at Wilber-Clatonia High School in Nebraska, where she had just moved with her mother, an Internet bride. "I knew simple words like cat and dog," Yanga says. "But it was hard to make a sentence or understand people." A girl from Mexico helped Yanga to open her locker, and taught her a little English. But that was it-Yanga says she was on her own to sink or swim. For a while, she sank. "I just didn't turn my assignments in for a while, and [my teachers] didn't say anything," she says. Eventually, though, Yanga got used to the new language and was able to turn things around for herself and become an excellent student. But it wasn't due to structured immersion or bilingual education or even a little extra help from her teachers. It was her own doing, a bootstrap effort. "I used a lot of dictionaries," she says, "and a lot of translation, and my stepdad was helping me, and that's how I got my English." In other words, Yanga succeeded at Wilber-Clatonia despite-not because of-the school's efforts on her behalf. That was in 2001. In 2005, Stephany Lopez moved from Mexico to Wilber-Clatonia. When she arrived at the elementary school as a second-grader, she could say yes and no in English and name the colors. She too had a helper her first day of school, another little girl from Mexico. When her classroom teacher asked Stephany to name her favorite color, the little girl translated the question and Stephany replied, "Blue." The similarities between Yanga and Stephany's experiences end there. Soon after arriving at school, Stephany's classroom teacher introduced her to two student volunteers from the high school, Yelith-za Rivera and Brissa Placek, both former immigrants. "They looked nice," says Stephany. And they were-nice, and knowledgeable. "Brissa came in the morning and Yeli in the afternoon, so they began to help me, and then on vacations, they showed me how to read, and how to understand English. I remember Yeli…[she] helped me with math…and Brissa helped me with language arts. I played some games, I read books, and I had to color." In this way, Stephany was able to learn English through structured immersion, picking up the vocabulary for new lessons ahead of time and getting help with reading outside of class time. Now she's an honor roll student, partly-as her helpers would be the first to admit-because she's a smart cookie with dedicated parents, but also because of the efforts of the Wilber-Clatonia schools. So what changed between 2001, when Yanga had to teach herself English, and 2005, when Stephany had two trained volunteers at her disposal? Around the same time that Yanga came to Wilber, several other non-English-speaking students came to school. They were a herald of things to come. The Wilber-Clatonia district, host to 540 students K-12, is nestled in the southeastern corner of Nebraska, about an hour southwest of Lincoln and about two hours from Omaha. One of its near neighbors-about 12 miles away-is Crete, home to a pork processing plant and a voting machine manufacturer, among other industrial ventures. Crete's schools host more than 1,500 students, with about 10 percent of them English language learners (ELLs). Crete's industries attract migrant and immigrant laborers, but Crete's housing prices are relatively high, and some of its workers have had to seek other places to live. Wilber and other surrounding towns have taken up the overflow. In 2001, when Yanga arrived in Wilber with her mother, the Wilber-Clatonia district had five ELLs. By the time Stephany arrived four years later, it had 14 ELLs-a significant increase for a small district. When more ELLs began arriving in Wilber-Clatonia-and state and federal guidelines for serving those students simultaneously became more stringent-high school principal Ron Oltmann and district superintendent Dave Rokusek knew they had to do something. They didn't have the budget they'd need to hire a full-time ELL coordinator and, because of the cost of becoming ESL-endorsed, few teachers want to take part-time work in rural districts. So Oltmann and Rokusek sought help from within. In 2004, they tapped a teacher named Janet Burger to coordinate education for the district's ELLs. Burger's efforts to improve and document the district's process for identifying, testing, assisting, and monitoring ELLs are the main reason that Stephany Lopez found learning English so much less stressful than Yanga Dolzhikova did. Burger's work is a testament to the difference that a little planning-and a lot of creativity and elbow grease-can make in the lives of ELLs. Burger isn't an ESL teacher. In fact, until 2002, she was a German teacher at Wilber-Clatonia High School, and had been for almost 20 years. That year, the Spanish teacher left and school administrators decided not to replace her. Burger protested. "I said, 'You can't do that! We're living 10 miles away from Crete, Nebraska, where 50 percent of the businesses are Hispanic-owned! We need to be realistic, we need to keep those lines of communication open!'" Administrators heard her plea, and Burger spent the next three years commuting back and forth to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Doane College in Crete, getting certified in Spanish. In the meantime, her principal and superintendent, eager to capitalize on her growing knowledge of Spanish, told her they wanted her to learn how to test the district's ELLs. In the course of getting up to speed on testing issues, Burger began working closely with Nancy Rowch, who handles No Child Left Behind Title III requirements for the state of Nebraska. Rowch taught Burger about the importance of putting in place a written plan for identifying, assessing, teaching, and monitoring ELLs. With Rowch's help and some training through her Educational Service Unit, Nebraska's state-mandated consortia of school districts, Burger began building such a plan. For each ELL in Wilber-Clatonia, Burger created an individualized learning plan, tested the student, met with his or her parents to discuss the results, decided whether the student could benefit from additional services and how often services should be offered, monitored the student's progress, and re-assessed the student to decide whether he or she could exit the program. Some teachers would have stopped there-especially if they were already busy learning Spanish, getting a new certification, raising kids, volunteering at church, and coaching One-Act, a theater group that puts on speedily produced, inexpensive one-act plays. "She needs to slow down," says Jean Cerveny, Stephany Lopez's classroom teacher and one of Burger's close friends. "I've told her that a lot. Sometimes she will only get one or two hours of sleep at night. She doesn't listen to me. She has got a lot of drive and ambition." And Burger wasn't done yet. She began working closely with the high school guidance counselor to find student volunteers who could deliver services to ELLs and create a structured immersion experience for them. She launched an after-school program to give additional help with vocabulary, reading, and other skills to students who were still struggling. And she created a summer program to make sure students didn't lose their English skills over the long, hot break. This year, 2006, that summer program has eight participants. Burger has done all this on a shoestring. When she needs money, she makes a request to her Educational Service Unit, which manages the budget that Wilber-Clatonia shares with the other districts in its Title III consortium. The total available to Burger this year is $1,453. To get her program up and running, Burger spent about $400 on materials-books, flashcards, tapes. Otherwise, the only other money she spends is for additional hours that she and two paraprofessionals put in. She has managed to stretch the district's tiny Title III budget to serve the 20 ELLs who qualified for services in the district in 2005-2006, about half of whom are just being monitored or receiving light assistance. Burger relies on a corps of volunteers, about 20 students and teachers. Students give up their study halls to work with ELLs on a rotating basis, pre-teaching vocabulary, re-explaining math facts, and generally working closely with classroom teachers to make sure kids manage the material with ease. Some student volunteers, like Yelith-za Rivera and Brissa Placek, the two that worked most closely with Stephany, have had sink-or-swim moments themselves. Brissa moved to Nebraska from Acapulco, Mexico, with her mom and her brother when she was eleven. "It was tough for me, too. That's what helped me connect with Stephany so much. I didn't speak a word of English and I got shoved in with all the kindergarteners so I could start from the beginning, and I didn't like that at all." Of her work with Stephany, she says, "I wanted to help her out because I was in her situation and I didn't want her to feel like she had to learn it as fast as she could because there was no other way to communicate. I wanted her to take her time and I wanted her to be comfortable." As far as Burger is concerned, making kids comfortable is at the very heart of teaching them a new language. And she extends the comfort she offers to their families, too. She often acts as a translator, helping parents understand their children's homework and other school interactions. Sometimes her help in these arenas grows into genuine friendship. One night, she visited the family of one of her students thinking she was dropping by to help with homework and to quickly taste a quesadilla and some Mexican pressed cheese. "[The quesadilla] was so cool-looking, real lacy with a real mild flavor, folded in half, fried on both sides," says Burger. "'Would you like to try one?' the daughter said. I sat down and she put two on a plate, and then there was this chili sauce, it's kind of hot, and then she put some cheese on the table, I'm just about halfway into the second one-" Six quesadillas, a piece of chicken, and two Pepsis later, she had promised to come back with a pumpkin pie, an item mentioned in the daughter's English lesson that night. Burger's winning personality is essential to her success, not only with her students and their families, but also with her coworkers, who are often roped into working with ELLs somewhat against their will. "Janet gets a lot of crabbiness because [teachers think] 'Oh, great, we've got a whole huge page to fill out because of this,' or 'We've got to test these kids, and there's no time,' and the teachers I work with are already stressed out," says Cerveny. "She tries incredibly hard not to be defensive, and [wants to know] 'How can I help you, I want to make this as easy as possible.'" This isn't just a line. Burger's commitment to serving others is at the core of her nature, as illustrated by a story Cerveny tells: A couple of years ago, Cerveny's house was hit by a tornado and she and her family had to move to a rental house in town. "It was just disgusting," says Cerveny. "Janet came to my house, came with a carpet cleaner and a ton of cleaning supplies-the bathroom downstairs, it was just sick-and she got a pumice stone out and just started out down on her hands and knees scrubbing away. An 'awesome friend' is just not even the word. She's just there for people when they are desperate." Desperate: That's how Stephany and Yanga felt when they first arrived at school in Wilber-Clatonia-and how most ELLs feel when they first walk into an all-English classroom. Yelith-za, one of the volunteers who saw Stephany on her first day of school, described her like this: "She was really scared. She was really scared and she looked like she was going to cry." For Yanga in 2001, there was no plan in place to relieve the sense of desperation, and ultimately, she ended up transferring to Crete for a year in search of a more welcoming community. She did find it easier to be there, among a population of Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Bosnian students. "And the teachers there were really nice; they were helping me with all my homework. I had a special class for English, they were teaching me grammar and stuff; it was a special class for immigrants." In the end she came back to Wilber-Clatonia, but she speaks far more fondly of Crete than of her hometown. Janet Burger can't offer Stephany-or any of the ELLs in Wilber-Clatonia-the feel of a larger community like Crete's. She can't deliver bilingual education or provide them with ESL teachers or classroom teachers who speak their languages. But she can-and does-structure their immersion at Wilber-Clatonia so that it's a little less terrifying. She helps them follow a prescription for success that is now well documented and can be repeated in the future, even if Burger herself moves on to another job someday. She keeps an eye on them so that if they start to sink, she can send in the swimming teacher. But most of all, she offers them her own special brand of comfort, delivered not only in her own reassuring voice but also in the voices of her volunteers. For Stephany, because of Burger, there was someone-a team of someones-to guide her in her moment of desperation. And there will be someone in all the moments that come after, when the desperation has turned to curiosity and the curiosity to the impulse to kick her feet out from under her and swim. If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.
Copyright © 2006 Course Crafters, Inc.® All rights reserved.

July/Aug 2006

Swimming Lessons: How a Dedicated Teacher Changed Life for ELLs in a Rural Nebraska Town

By Sarah Auerbach, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer

Yanga Dolzhikova couldn't understand a word her classmates or teachers were saying. Despite having taken three years of English in Russia, twelve-year-old Yanga was ill-equipped for her first day of school at Wilber-Clatonia High School in Nebraska, where she had just moved with her mother, an Internet bride. "I knew simple words like cat and dog," Yanga says. "But it was hard to make a sentence or understand people."

A girl from Mexico helped Yanga to open her locker, and taught her a little English. But that was it-Yanga says she was on her own to sink or swim. For a while, she sank. "I just didn't turn my assignments in for a while, and [my teachers] didn't say anything," she says.

Eventually, though, Yanga got used to the new language and was able to turn things around for herself and become an excellent student. But it wasn't due to structured immersion or bilingual education or even a little extra help from her teachers. It was her own doing, a bootstrap effort. "I used a lot of dictionaries," she says, "and a lot of translation, and my stepdad was helping me, and that's how I got my English." In other words, Yanga succeeded at Wilber-Clatonia despite-not because of-the school's efforts on her behalf.

That was in 2001.

In 2005, Stephany Lopez moved from Mexico to Wilber-Clatonia. When she arrived at the elementary school as a second-grader, she could say yes and no in English and name the colors. She too had a helper her first day of school, another little girl from Mexico. When her classroom teacher asked Stephany to name her favorite color, the little girl translated the question and Stephany replied, "Blue."

The similarities between Yanga and Stephany's experiences end there. Soon after arriving at school, Stephany's classroom teacher introduced her to two student volunteers from the high school, Yelith-za Rivera and Brissa Placek, both former immigrants. "They looked nice," says Stephany. And they were-nice, and knowledgeable. "Brissa came in the morning and Yeli in the afternoon, so they began to help me, and then on vacations, they showed me how to read, and how to understand English. I remember Yeli…[she] helped me with math…and Brissa helped me with language arts. I played some games, I read books, and I had to color." In this way, Stephany was able to learn English through structured immersion, picking up the vocabulary for new lessons ahead of time and getting help with reading outside of class time. Now she's an honor roll student, partly-as her helpers would be the first to admit-because she's a smart cookie with dedicated parents, but also because of the efforts of the Wilber-Clatonia schools.

So what changed between 2001, when Yanga had to teach herself English, and 2005, when Stephany had two trained volunteers at her disposal?

Around the same time that Yanga came to Wilber, several other non-English-speaking students came to school. They were a herald of things to come. The Wilber-Clatonia district, host to 540 students K-12, is nestled in the southeastern corner of Nebraska, about an hour southwest of Lincoln and about two hours from Omaha. One of its near neighbors-about 12 miles away-is Crete, home to a pork processing plant and a voting machine manufacturer, among other industrial ventures. Crete's schools host more than 1,500 students, with about 10 percent of them English language learners (ELLs). Crete's industries attract migrant and immigrant laborers, but Crete's housing prices are relatively high, and some of its workers have had to seek other places to live. Wilber and other surrounding towns have taken up the overflow. In 2001, when Yanga arrived in Wilber with her mother, the Wilber-Clatonia district had five ELLs. By the time Stephany arrived four years later, it had 14 ELLs-a significant increase for a small district.

When more ELLs began arriving in Wilber-Clatonia-and state and federal guidelines for serving those students simultaneously became more stringent-high school principal Ron Oltmann and district superintendent Dave Rokusek knew they had to do something. They didn't have the budget they'd need to hire a full-time ELL coordinator and, because of the cost of becoming ESL-endorsed, few teachers want to take part-time work in rural districts. So Oltmann and Rokusek sought help from within. In 2004, they tapped a teacher named Janet Burger to coordinate education for the district's ELLs. Burger's efforts to improve and document the district's process for identifying, testing, assisting, and monitoring ELLs are the main reason that Stephany Lopez found learning English so much less stressful than Yanga Dolzhikova did. Burger's work is a testament to the difference that a little planning-and a lot of creativity and elbow grease-can make in the lives of ELLs.

Burger isn't an ESL teacher. In fact, until 2002, she was a German teacher at Wilber-Clatonia High School, and had been for almost 20 years. That year, the Spanish teacher left and school administrators decided not to replace her. Burger protested. "I said, 'You can't do that! We're living 10 miles away from Crete, Nebraska, where 50 percent of the businesses are Hispanic-owned! We need to be realistic, we need to keep those lines of communication open!'" Administrators heard her plea, and Burger spent the next three years commuting back and forth to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and Doane College in Crete, getting certified in Spanish.

In the meantime, her principal and superintendent, eager to capitalize on her growing knowledge of Spanish, told her they wanted her to learn how to test the district's ELLs. In the course of getting up to speed on testing issues, Burger began working closely with Nancy Rowch, who handles No Child Left Behind Title III requirements for the state of Nebraska. Rowch taught Burger about the importance of putting in place a written plan for identifying, assessing, teaching, and monitoring ELLs. With Rowch's help and some training through her Educational Service Unit, Nebraska's state-mandated consortia of school districts, Burger began building such a plan. For each ELL in Wilber-Clatonia, Burger created an individualized learning plan, tested the student, met with his or her parents to discuss the results, decided whether the student could benefit from additional services and how often services should be offered, monitored the student's progress, and re-assessed the student to decide whether he or she could exit the program.

Some teachers would have stopped there-especially if they were already busy learning Spanish, getting a new certification, raising kids, volunteering at church, and coaching One-Act, a theater group that puts on speedily produced, inexpensive one-act plays. "She needs to slow down," says Jean Cerveny, Stephany Lopez's classroom teacher and one of Burger's close friends. "I've told her that a lot. Sometimes she will only get one or two hours of sleep at night. She doesn't listen to me. She has got a lot of drive and ambition."

And Burger wasn't done yet. She began working closely with the high school guidance counselor to find student volunteers who could deliver services to ELLs and create a structured immersion experience for them. She launched an after-school program to give additional help with vocabulary, reading, and other skills to students who were still struggling. And she created a summer program to make sure students didn't lose their English skills over the long, hot break. This year, 2006, that summer program has eight participants.

Burger has done all this on a shoestring. When she needs money, she makes a request to her Educational Service Unit, which manages the budget that Wilber-Clatonia shares with the other districts in its Title III consortium. The total available to Burger this year is $1,453. To get her program up and running, Burger spent about $400 on materials-books, flashcards, tapes. Otherwise, the only other money she spends is for additional hours that she and two paraprofessionals put in. She has managed to stretch the district's tiny Title III budget to serve the 20 ELLs who qualified for services in the district in 2005-2006, about half of whom are just being monitored or receiving light assistance.

Burger relies on a corps of volunteers, about 20 students and teachers. Students give up their study halls to work with ELLs on a rotating basis, pre-teaching vocabulary, re-explaining math facts, and generally working closely with classroom teachers to make sure kids manage the material with ease.

Some student volunteers, like Yelith-za Rivera and Brissa Placek, the two that worked most closely with Stephany, have had sink-or-swim moments themselves. Brissa moved to Nebraska from Acapulco, Mexico, with her mom and her brother when she was eleven. "It was tough for me, too. That's what helped me connect with Stephany so much. I didn't speak a word of English and I got shoved in with all the kindergarteners so I could start from the beginning, and I didn't like that at all." Of her work with Stephany, she says, "I wanted to help her out because I was in her situation and I didn't want her to feel like she had to learn it as fast as she could because there was no other way to communicate. I wanted her to take her time and I wanted her to be comfortable."

As far as Burger is concerned, making kids comfortable is at the very heart of teaching them a new language. And she extends the comfort she offers to their families, too. She often acts as a translator, helping parents understand their children's homework and other school interactions. Sometimes her help in these arenas grows into genuine friendship. One night, she visited the family of one of her students thinking she was dropping by to help with homework and to quickly taste a quesadilla and some Mexican pressed cheese. "[The quesadilla] was so cool-looking, real lacy with a real mild flavor, folded in half, fried on both sides," says Burger. "'Would you like to try one?' the daughter said. I sat down and she put two on a plate, and then there was this chili sauce, it's kind of hot, and then she put some cheese on the table, I'm just about halfway into the second one-" Six quesadillas, a piece of chicken, and two Pepsis later, she had promised to come back with a pumpkin pie, an item mentioned in the daughter's English lesson that night.

Burger's winning personality is essential to her success, not only with her students and their families, but also with her coworkers, who are often roped into working with ELLs somewhat against their will. "Janet gets a lot of crabbiness because [teachers think] 'Oh, great, we've got a whole huge page to fill out because of this,' or 'We've got to test these kids, and there's no time,' and the teachers I work with are already stressed out," says Cerveny. "She tries incredibly hard not to be defensive, and [wants to know] 'How can I help you, I want to make this as easy as possible.'"

This isn't just a line. Burger's commitment to serving others is at the core of her nature, as illustrated by a story Cerveny tells: A couple of years ago, Cerveny's house was hit by a tornado and she and her family had to move to a rental house in town. "It was just disgusting," says Cerveny. "Janet came to my house, came with a carpet cleaner and a ton of cleaning supplies-the bathroom downstairs, it was just sick-and she got a pumice stone out and just started out down on her hands and knees scrubbing away. An 'awesome friend' is just not even the word. She's just there for people when they are desperate."

Desperate: That's how Stephany and Yanga felt when they first arrived at school in Wilber-Clatonia-and how most ELLs feel when they first walk into an all-English classroom. Yelith-za, one of the volunteers who saw Stephany on her first day of school, described her like this: "She was really scared. She was really scared and she looked like she was going to cry."

For Yanga in 2001, there was no plan in place to relieve the sense of desperation, and ultimately, she ended up transferring to Crete for a year in search of a more welcoming community. She did find it easier to be there, among a population of Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Bosnian students. "And the teachers there were really nice; they were helping me with all my homework. I had a special class for English, they were teaching me grammar and stuff; it was a special class for immigrants." In the end she came back to Wilber-Clatonia, but she speaks far more fondly of Crete than of her hometown.

Janet Burger can't offer Stephany-or any of the ELLs in Wilber-Clatonia-the feel of a larger community like Crete's. She can't deliver bilingual education or provide them with ESL teachers or classroom teachers who speak their languages. But she can-and does-structure their immersion at Wilber-Clatonia so that it's a little less terrifying. She helps them follow a prescription for success that is now well documented and can be repeated in the future, even if Burger herself moves on to another job someday. She keeps an eye on them so that if they start to sink, she can send in the swimming teacher. But most of all, she offers them her own special brand of comfort, delivered not only in her own reassuring voice but also in the voices of her volunteers. For Stephany, because of Burger, there was someone-a team of someones-to guide her in her moment of desperation. And there will be someone in all the moments that come after, when the desperation has turned to curiosity and the curiosity to the impulse to kick her feet out from under her and swim.

If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.