City gets its first adult English class

By Timothy Pratt

Thursday, Oct. 17, 2002 | 11:27 a.m.

Luz Lopez came to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico, 12 years ago, but hadn't set foot in a classroom to learn English until last week.

She was busy raising her children, Alex, 11, and Yamili, 10. Then she began working in a Fatburger restaurant, where she says she has picked up enough English to make herself understood.

"But I'm still embarrassed at work, and I want to learn more," the 30-year-old mother said.

So when her daughter brought home a flier from Robert Taylor Elementary School last week announcing that the Clark County School District would be giving its first adult education English classes in Henderson, Lopez signed up.

So did at least 30 others, enough to fill the fourth grade classroom at Robert Taylor last Tuesday for the first session.

Sitting on child-sized chairs, groundskeepers, burger flippers and homemakers took their next step in becoming Americans, spending the first half of the three-hour class on the alphabet. They mouthed "A" for "apple" and "B" for " ball." "Y" for "yo-yo" brought laughter from the room, sounding funny to the room of adults who may have never had the toy.

The English class, the first such program in a Henderson school, came about after teachers began noticing that more of their students were enrolling in English as a Second Language classes in the past two years, and that the children's parents had the same need.

The teachers figured the same thing was happening in other parts of Henderson, as well.

"About 10 percent of our students are enrolled in ESL classes, where there used to not be any at all," said Amy Cartwright, literacy specialist at Robert Taylor and one of two teachers of the adult class.

"Parents kept asking about English classes, and we realized that the Hispanic population in Henderson is growing, just like in the rest of the valley," she said.

The classes are free, but the students have to pay $15 for books. The classes last about 14 weeks, at nine hours a week. At least 30 such classes are offered in Las Vegas and North Las Vegas.

Francisco Garcia, from Michoacan, Mexico, spent part of Tuesday night sweating over the class' registration form. A groundskeeper at a local golf course, he couldn't remember when he had last attended school in Mexico, or the name of the school. He left that part of the form blank.

"How do you spell Westminster Road?" he asked whoever could answer him.

Garcia said he heard about the class from a commercial on Univision, one of two Spanish-language television stations in the valley.

Francisca Ayala, a 30-year-old mother of two children, one a third grader at Robert Taylor, offered another reason for taking the class.

"Now I can help my children with their homework," she said.

That's the key benefit educators like to see from the classes, Cartwright said.

"If they can participate more in their children's education, then their children will do better in school," she said.

Then Ayala added another good reason:

"I can explain what I want in stores."