COUNTYWIDE : 18% of Students Lack Fluency in English

More than 18% of Orange County’s public school students are not fluent in English, almost double the number six years ago, according to a statewide end-of-the-decade report on language proficiency released Friday by the state Department of Education.

The Orange County numbers closely reflect statewide figures that show an explosive growth in the number of limited-English-speaking students in grades kindergarten through 12, according to the report.

“The influx of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds is a big challenge for our schools,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said in a statement Friday. “It comes at a time when California’s schools are already the most crowded in the nation, and when we are demanding higher levels of performance from our educators and our students.”

James Fulton of the state Education Department’s demographics unit said the number of limited-English students in Orange County soared from 33,133 in 1982 to 64,544 in 1989. Total student enrollment in Orange County grew by only 2% during the same period, he said.

As a percentage of the total school enrollment, the limited-English student population rose from 9.6% in 1982 to 18.4% in 1989, Fulton said.

The report also found that another 47,000 Orange County students who speak a foreign language at home are fluent in English. But Fulton noted that most of those students are in the upper grades.

“When you look at kindergarten through six, for example, roughly seven in 10 students are LEP (limited-English-proficiency) kids,” Fulton said. “When we look at FEPs (fluent-English proficiency), we find that it’s about 51% in grades seven through 12.”

Most of the LEP students in all grades statewide speak Spanish, according to the report.

In Orange County, 47,577 of the 64,544 LEP students, or about 73.7%, speak Spanish; 7,182, or 11.1%, speak Vietnamese; and 1,772 students, or 2.7%, speak Korean. Of the nine other major languages in county schools--Cantonese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Lao, Mandarin, Armenian, Japanese and Farsi--there are less than 1,000 LEP students in each.