Teacher program targets bilingual college grads

Benjamin Grove

Sunday, March 22, 1998 | 9:32 a.m.

First-grade teacher Robyn Covey whips through flash cards with 17 squirming pupils assembled in a semi-circle around her on the floor.

The students call out the words. "Noche." "Norte." "Nido." "Nube."

"We're studying the 'N,'" she explains later.

Covey, 26, and her team teacher, Xochitl Sandoval, 24, are part of an innovative new program in the Clark County School District designed to meet the overwhelming demand for bilingual teachers. In their first semester of teaching, together they manage a class of 40 Spanish-speaking first-graders at Halle Hewetson Elementary School.

The program, called Alternative Route to Licensure, targets college-educated, bilingual adults who want to teach. The district gives them four months of training and then places them in classrooms.

The year-old program now has 40 such teachers in classrooms at 15 county schools.

Officials devised the program after years of bilingual teacher shortages.

"We said, what are we going to do? We can't get bilingual teachers," Lina Gutierrez, who oversees the program, said. "Now for the first time we don't have any openings in bilingual education."

The new teachers, who agree to earn their master's degrees in three years at their own expense, get about 120 hours of training before they hit the classroom. Then they are immediately immersed in the joys and frustrations of teaching, buoyed by the guidance of a mentor teacher.

Both Covey and Sandoval said they believed they were qualified to teach, despite warnings that some veteran teachers may not welcome them.

"We may not have a lot of theory, but we've got the hands-on experience," Sandoval said.

Their mentor agreed.

"They know what they are doing and they are very well trained by the district," Hewetson teacher Andrea Suarez said. "They have experience in other fields and they bring it to the classroom. I want to tell people who think they are not ready, they are."

Hewetson principal Tom Maveal said it may not be ideal to plug teachers into classrooms who have no experience and who did not receive formal training in education while in college. But it seems to be working, and it's better than not filling positions, he said.

"This program has been a godsend to me," said Maveal, who has 22 bilingual teachers at the school, where 88 percent of the students speak Spanish. "I'm thinking of the kids. What do we do with a monolingual teacher in a class with 20 kids who don't speak English?"

Teachers in the program come from various backgrounds.

Covey served as a Mormon missionary in Guatemala; Sandoval graduated last year with a degree in communications from Pepperdine University.

Martha Valella has been teaching at C.P. Squires Elementary School just a few weeks, after 16 years as a counselor. She took a $15,000-a-year pay cut to lead a class of 24 fourth-graders who have had five teachers since August.

"They don't have any structure or discipline, so I spent the first week teaching behavior in the classroom," Valella said. "The kids are really appreciative that their teacher speaks Spanish."

Valella, like Covey and Sandoval, said it was an easy decision to use their Spanish to help children.

"I was just trying to find myself, I guess," said Sandoval, who jumped to teaching after a stint in marketing. "I fell in love with it. I love coming here every day. I don't know if I could say the same about my other job."

Several children in Sandoval's and Covey's class said they liked their teachers.

"They are all really, really nice and they help people with their problems," 6-year-old Carmen Salgado said. "The hardest part of school is when you're learning new words."