HOENIX, Dec. 13 — Already disheartened and confused by the passage five weeks ago of a statewide referendum to dismantle bilingual education, Arizona's bilingual educators were further battered by a letter that appeared recently in The Arizona Daily Star.
The writer was Ron K. Unz, the Silicon Valley millionaire who led the successful effort to end bilingual education in California two years ago, then brought his campaign here, and says New York City, Massachusetts and Colorado are next on his list.
Concerned that some Arizona teachers and administrators might be tempted to ignore the new law, Mr. Unz wrote to the newspaper, "If a public school employee willfully violates this law, he or she can be sued, held personally liable by the parent of any schoolchild in Arizona and may be driven into personal bankruptcy."
There was only one problem with Mr. Unz's letter: it misread the very measure that he had helped to write. While district administrators and board members can be held liable for not enforcing the law, which was approved by a two-to-one ratio, the law does not address the personal liability of most school employees, including teachers. Told later, in an e-mail message from a reporter, that Arizona teachers need not fear financial ruin as a punishment under the new measure, Mr. Unz wrote back from Northern California, "You're right."
About 100 bilingual educators from around Arizona gathered at a conference here last week to disentangle the measure, which will affect 100,000 students, or nearly 1 in 8 statewide, beginning next fall. Though many said they had campaigned vigorously against the initiative, which will assign students with limited knowledge of English to one- year crash courses conducted almost exclusively in English, they said they would heed the will of the voters.
"It's the law," said Jeannie Favela, the director of bilingual education for the Sunnyside Unified School District in Tucson, where one in four students is in the bilingual program. "We can't sit around anymore and debate it."
That being said, the law, like its predecessor in California, permits districts to consider requests from parents for waivers that would allow their children to continue in bilingual classes. And much of the talk at the all-day conference centered on how parents could be encouraged to exercise those provisions.
The law allows districts to grant waivers to children in three main categories: those who demonstrate through oral or written tests that they already speak English fluently; those with psychological needs that are demonstrably aggravated in an English-only class; and those who in the school's opinion would be better served in a bilingual setting, though only if those children are 10 or older.
Conference participants agreed that parents of children in kindergarten through fourth grade would have the most difficulty securing a waiver. Though preliminary test results from California suggest that younger children are more likely than older children to become fluent in English immersion classes, the educators here worried that younger children would be bewildered by classes in which their native tongue was effectively outlawed.
Most of those affected by the law are Spanish-speaking, though a small percentage speak American Indian languages. In Arizona Mr. Unz railed, as he had in California, against districts for allowing some students to languish for six years or more in bilingual programs, learning neither English nor their native language well.
