"The Spanish-speaking student enrollment in city schools’ English as a Second Language programs increased by 33 this year, up 37.1 percent from last year, according to a report presented to the Charlottesville School Board on Thursday. The overall ESL student population increased by 70 this year.

ESL Coordinator Beverly Catlin said the rise in Spanish-speaking students is not as high as in other areas of Virginia.

“It is a jump,” she said. “It is not the same kind of jump, for example, that Albemarle County has seen. I do anticipate that our Spanish-speaking population will increase as it increases in the state. I don’t anticipate that it will have the same kind of increase that it has in other localities. And I think the affordable housing piece becomes a huge question there.”

Since 2000, ESL enrollment in city schools has increased by 243 students, from 96 to 339. In 2000, the division had no full-time ESL teachers. Since then, it has hired seven.

“It makes it difficult when we don’t have a person at each school to handle the numbers that are there,” Catlin said. The city has nine schools.

The rise in the ESL student population is due in large part to the International Rescue Committee in Charlottesville, a group that has resettled refugees to the area since 1998. The IRC provides programs to assimilate refugees for their first four months in the U.S.

The city’s ESL students, immigrants as well as refugees, speak 39 different languages.

“One of the things that always seems so daunting when I think about ESL in this community is how many of these potentially preliterate cultural refugees we have and how many come in with very limited oral and written communication skills,” board member Louis Bograd said.

Catlin broadly compared the division’s Spanish-speakers with the refugees, most of whom speak other languages. She said that the English proficiency of those whose second language is Spanish are at a beginning level, but their prior academic experiences are much more substantial than the refugee students." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, December 8, 2006)