Local college has state’s largest ESL program

When marriage brought Priscilla Rincon Jimenez, now 44, from Colombia to the United States, she knew very little English.

“I studied English in my country, but only when I [was in] high school,” Jimenez said, her English conversational but still broken. She also studied English for a year in college in Latin America.

In February 2013, Jimenez began studying English as a second language (ESL) at Georgia Piedmont Technical College (GPTC).

Georgia Piedmont has “good teachers, quality teachers,” Jimenez said.

Although she studied English at a Latin America institution, she prefers the education she received at GPTC, she said.

“I recommended Georgia Piedmont to another classmate,” said Jimenez, who lives in Decatur. “I have recommended [it to] three people now.”

Each year, GPTC typically serves approximately 4,000 ESL students, said Diane Hunter, the college’s ESL Coordinator. “This year so far, since July [2013], we have already served 2,200, so we’re on track to meet our goal.”

The school has seven ESL programs in three counties with day, night and Saturday classes, open computer labs and distance learning, Hunter said. In the ESL program, student contact hours vary from six to 10 hours a week of in-class, face-to-face with an instructor.

“Our students progress at their own pace through the program,” Hunter said. “Some are here a brief time, even a semester, and some can be with us for years as they progress through speaking, listening, reading and writing.

“The program has students from more than 100 countries and 46 percent of the students have refugee or asylee status,” Hunter said.

“Our major refugee site is in Clarkston where the day and night programs together are 77 percent refugees,” she said.

“We have a special group of students—refugee and non-refugee—that are pre- and nonliterate, who never learned to read in their own country or are preliterate in English,” Hunter said. “That group is 92 percent refugees.”

Some ESL students have degrees from their countries, but don’t know English.

“We have students that have degrees from their countries that don’t know our alphabet,” Hunter said. “Then we have those students who were uneducated in their own countries.

“We’re a very unique site,” she said. “In 2012, 87 percent of the refugees that came into the state of Georgia came to DeKalb County and we serve them. They come to us for English. We have the largest ESL program in the state, by far.”

With program locations in Doraville and Clarkston, the program is manned by a mostly part-time staff.

Enrollment in the ESL program is steady overall, Hunter said, “but we have lost a lot of students in Doraville because of the state law for verification of eligibility for public benefits. They must prove that they have legal status in order to attend our programs. So we have lost a lot of undocumented students who have not been able to comply. The refugee population does not apply because they are all legal.”

While taking classes, students go the ESL lab at least once every one or two weeks.

“They have a scheduled time during their regular class room time in which they go to the lab,” Hunter said. “The lab instructor and the classroom instructor work together to supplement what’s going on in the class as enrichment activities.”

The open labs, which are offered on Saturdays in Clarkston and Doraville, give students computer time to receive additional ESL training.

GPTC’s ESL program has tracks that prepare students for citizenship and to earn their GED.

“We try to adapt it to the students’ needs,” Hunter said. “We have students that leave us and go directly into the credit program because they have their diploma from their country. And then we have others who just need a better job.”

Hunter said some of the stories she hears from the students “pull on your heart strings.”

“When I sit in front of a woman who last week was a farmer in Somalia and she knows no English and I know no Somali, and we look at each other, we get it. It’s a connection which is such a blessing. We teach them, but they teach us so much more.”

Hunter said the ESL program’s impact on students is “tremendous.”

You can’t help your child in school or talk to the teacher or ride the MARTA bus or get a job that can give a living wage if you can’t navigate in English,” Hunter said. “The ticket to achieving professional and academic dreams in this country is to learn the language. That’s what we’re about.”