It didn’t take a baseball movie to convince Frank Klock that “If you build it, they will come.” In recent years, the Indian Prairie District 204 administrator has seen the tagline from the movie “Field of Dreams” come to life.
“Just as quickly as they’re putting up buildings out here, they’re being filled,” Klock said.
The result? As District 204’s coordinator of English as a Second Language, Klock said the case load–50 ESL students a decade ago and less than 100 when he arrived in the district five years later–has grown to the 600 students he oversees today. ESL teachers have increased to 23 from four, when Klock began.
“And we’re just expecting more of the same,” said Klock, a founding member of the Consortium of DuPage ESL and Bilingual Education Teachers.
“We’re at 3 percent of the district’s population coming into the ESL program, but we also have another 3 or 4 percent who are able to get by but hear languages at home that are not English.”
Klock can point to 83 languages represented among the district’s more than 21,000 students.
Overall, in the past 15 years, DuPage County schools have seen an ESL population explosion of 235 percent, said Darlene Ruscitti, assistant regional superintendent.
“It’s certainly something that our regional office keeps talking about with school administrators,” she said.
The needs of area students, and their immigrant families, not only has affected schools but also has swelled the client loads at community agencies and created waiting lists for adult literacy programs, including those at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, which is the largest provider of adult education in the county.
With 3,500 literacy students a quarter, the college has seen a 50 percent increase in five years. Funded by grants, the school’s ESL programs are free to clients. ESL is an immersion-type program in which lessons are taught in English.
“We have wait lists for the majority of our classes. We could enroll more, but we’re limited by funding and facilities,” said Carol Garcia, the college’s coordinator of ESL and literacy programs.
Those shortfalls are not the only problem.
“With DuPage County, there are not ethnic neighborhoods like there are in Cook,” Garcia said. “The service providers are far-flung.”
Which means that transportation and child care are obstacles too, she said.
Literacy programs once focused on teaching English reading and writing skills to native speakers who lacked the basics. Now, most literacy students speak another native language.
“When I began here 12 years ago, our program was evenly divided between basic reading and ESL, and now it’s almost exclusively ESL,” said Peggy Coker, director of Literacy Volunteers of America, Fox Valley.
“St. Charles is a booming town with $500,000 houses, but we’re much more diversified than people think,” she added.
With 200 volunteers, the group serves about 230 adult learners annually and expects that need to grow.
Census projections concur.
By 2020 about 1.5 million jobs will be added to the region, said Marc Thomas, a senior planning analyst for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission in Chicago. All industry sectors are expected to grow except manufacturing. That economic opportunity will attract more people.
According to those forecasts, all population increases in the six-county region will be minority, and two-thirds of that will be due to Hispanic growth. NIPC estimates this increase in population in the six-county region will be close to 2 million people over a 30-year period that ends in 2020, and the majority will be Hispanic.
Currently, though, DuPage County is unique in the area, Thomas said. “The largest minority group is Asian and Pacific Islander, as opposed to what you find most anywhere else, where it would be black or Hispanic.”
“We would think that maybe over time, just because there is going to be such pressure from Hispanic population growth in our area, that perhaps Hispanics would finally overtake Asians as the largest minority group,” in DuPage County, he said.
About 60 percent of the clients of Literacy Volunteers of America-DuPage are Asian, said Jacqueline Peterson, executive director.
The Naperville-Lisle area has a sizable concentration of Asian families; the northeast corner has a strong Hispanic influence, as does the area around West Chicago. In the south, around Woodridge, Darien and Westmont, many countries and cultures are represented, Peterson said.
“Ten years ago, the census identified DuPage County as one of the 50 most culturally diverse counties in the whole country,” she said, “and that the influx to this area was more than in 1940-1950, when we had a tremendous immigrant and refugee population increase after (World War II).”
The newcomers mean that the DuPage literacy chapter needs more help to supplement the 200 tutors. “We have a very swollen student wait list of those who need help,” Peterson said.
For more information on:
– The English as a Second Language and literacy programs at the College of DuPage, call 630-942-3697.
– The Literacy Volunteers of America, Fox Valley, call 630-584-2811.
– The Literacy Volunteers of America, DuPage, call 630-416-6699.
