English courses reshaping lives for adults and their families

Israel Alvarez's days once dawned long before the sun inched over the horizon. By 4 a.m. the bachelor was hauling away heaps of cardboard boxes from a downtown Chicago chicken-packing plant where everyone spoke only Spanish. And after a 12-hour shift, he would drag his weary body to evening ESL classes.

Alvarez came from Mexico with one goal in mind: to earn enough money to propose to his girlfriend. Like many students of English juggling school and work, he soon abandoned the class to tend to other responsibilities.

A few years later, Alvarez — now a married SeaTac resident — re-enrolled in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes at his sister-in-law's insistence. This time, he stuck with it.

By showing up night after night, Alvarez made a gradual improvement in English that has enabled him to reshape the course of his life. Today, his full-time construction foreman's job with benefits supports his wife, two kids and their two-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac.

Alvarez knows how he got here: Two nights a week, for three years, he attended the advanced ESL class at Bow Lake Elementary School.

Bow Lake is one of 22 ESL sites in South King County run by Highline Community College, home to the largest program for adult English-language learners in the state. The classes, offered day and night throughout the year, are inexpensive — $25 a quarter and free to those who can't pay. A few locations provide child care. Currently, 3,500 students are enrolled — more than half of whom attend classes in the community rather than on campus. In the past three years, off-campus sites were 40 percent of the program's growth. Windsor Heights Apartments in SeaTac, for instance, opened this spring.

Reaching out to families

In recent years, Highline launched Family Literacy, which offers English-language courses for adults and age-appropriate learning activities for their children.

By doing so, the community college has made connections with more students — citizens, immigrants and refugees who may be working parents, stay-at-home mothers or people who don't drive but can walk or take public transportation to a local school.

Lack of affordable child care is often a hurdle for ESL students.

At Bow Lake, for instance, a partnership with the Highline School District and local nonprofit Para Los Niños — whose staff provides free children's activities — has given many the opportunity to better their English skills.

Introducing Family Literacy to a site like Bow Lake that previously held adult-only ESL courses is important, said Stephen Washburn, who directs the ESL programs for Highline Community College. "It can easily double or triple the student participation rate.

"This not only improves the parents' economic and educational opportunity, but it's also improving the kids' economic and educational opportunity."

At Bow Lake alone, there's a waiting list nearly 20-kids long for several of the school-readiness classes, said Lupita Ayón, director of Burien-based Para Los Niños.

Learning together

When Family Literacy arrived at Bow Lake, it meant that Alvarez's wife, Elia Contreras, could attend classes with him rather than stay home with the children. And for Alvarez's longtime ESL instructor Linda Louie, it spelled the end of teaching every lesson twice as husbands and wives alternated between coming to class and watching the kids.

On Monday and Wednesday nights during the school year, while Alvarez, Contreras and their peers congregate at 3-foot-tall tables in the library and the beginning adult ESL class meets across the hall, a teacher helps school-age kids with homework in an adjacent room. At the same time, volunteers in another class teach preschoolers how to write their names, as caretakers in yet another room rock infants to sleep.

A lot of parents come just so their children can begin to learn in a school setting.

While their moms and dads study English, the kids in Bow Lake's school-age class furrow their eyebrows, focusing on their homework, yellow No. 2 pencils in hand. They laugh aloud at pirate John Silver's adventures at story time, nibbling on graham crackers. And on a recent hot night, the kids made ice cream from scratch.

"When I'm on a math problem and I don't know what a word means, I ask the teacher and the teacher tells me," said fourth-grader Andres Alejandre. "I would have got bad grades without it. But now I get better grades."

Alejandra Blakeslee, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher at Bow Lake in charge of the program's school-age kids, rubbed her hand against a dark-haired second-grader's head.

"When this little guy started the year, he couldn't read anything," she said. "Now he's progressing. He can read probably at at least a first-grade level. He still has problems, but he'll make it."

A community of learners

Louie teaches one of the few year-round ESL classes at Highline.

Along with instructing English, she frequently imparts job and life skills.

Once a week, Louie takes the 20-member advanced ESL class to the computer lab, where the students gravitate toward the keyboards and immediately grab a mouse to make their way around the screens. The ongoing lesson: how to merge Word and Excel documents.

The class is already familiar with basic Word and how to type résumés and letters.

On other days, she also takes them to the library to observe how a librarian reads to kids; to a bookstore for a tour; and to nearby museums, like the Museum of Flight.

A few years ago, she and her students didn't want to interrupt their studies for spring break, so they held class at Denny's. Summers, when the Bow Lake site is closed, Louie finds other locations.

Helping students comes naturally to Louie.

For more than a decade, she worked at the motor-vehicles office in Salem, Ore., spending much of her time helping people with her very limited Spanish. Eventually, Louie decided to go back to school to become an ESL teacher; she's now the first person in her family to earn a college degree.

"I think one of the main things I do as a teacher is motivate them," Louie said. "I'm like a cheerleader.

"They just get enough English so that they can communicate. They can fill out a job application and they get by."

But Louie doesn't want her students to just get by. She wants them — and their children — to thrive.

"One of the neatest experiences that happens to me is occasionally I'll be out shopping and this person will come up to me and say, 'Mrs. Louie, you don't remember me, but I was in your ESL class and I got my GED and now I'm taking regular classes at my college' — and that makes my day for a whole week."

Judy Chia Hui Hsu: 206-464-3315 or jhsu@seattletimes.com