Consultants’ testimony differs over U46 stance on ELL program

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Updated: January 23, 2012 4:11AM

CHICAGO — Alba Ortiz said she’d thought about Elgin School District’s SET SWAS program a lot since she was asked to audit the district’s English Language Learners program in October 2008.

“And I’ve tried to figure out, ‘What sense does it make?’ ” Ortiz said.

Ortiz is one of two consultants who came to different conclusions after auditing the Elgin school district’s ELL program. Both presented those conclusions Wednesday on day three of the racial discrimination trial against U46 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago.

The lawsuit alleges the district discriminated against black and Hispanic students by placing them in overcrowded schools in its 2004 school boundary plan and not offering them access to gifted and advanced programs or appropriate help to English Language Learners.

SET SWAS, or Spanish English Transition School Within A School, was the Elgin school district’s gifted program for students who had left its ELL program. That program was separate from SWAS, the program for general education students who were identified as gifted.

Ortiz, of the bilingual education faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, said if SET SWAS students were proficient in English, “I would consider that an example of institutional discrimination.”

But Lorraine Plum, who audited U46’s gifted program in 2006 and later its academy program, said SET SWAS students still needed language interventions.

“These children still had some difficulty understanding the advanced vocabulary. … It was challenging for them,” Plum said.

Plum, a consultant to the Illinois State Board of Education and Kane County Regional Office of Education, said she made several recommendations to the school district in the report it invited her to make. Those included giving SET SWAS students more opportunities to mingle with their peers in SWAS and making clear parents and teachers could nominate students for the program anytime — something the district did in practice, if not in writing, she said.

“The charge I had in writing this report was how to make a great program even better,” she said.

Meantime, Ortiz, an expert witness for the plaintiffs, said her report was meant to identify “areas I thought services were compromised.”

There were two things about the district’s ELL program that struck her. One was its 2002 mandate that all ELL students must leave the program after three years, she said. The other was an email from then-Superintendent Connie Neale confirming she wanted ELL students to leave as quickly as possible, she added.

Karen Carney and Ken Kaczynski, past presidents of the U46 Board of Education, both confirmed Wednesday the board had delegated responsibility for the ELL program to the Neale administration. Carney echoed Neale’s testimony from Monday when she said, “I believe No Child Left Behind dictated what we were going to be doing. ... No Child Left Behind guided all school districts in a direction we hadn’t seen before.”

But Ortiz said if time was the criterion the district used to move ELL students out of the program, it was a “flagrant violation” of the intent of the law and set up an environment of “colossal failure.”

U46’s attorneys are expected to continue their cross-examination of Ortiz today.