Editor’s note: This is the third story of a three-part series looking at diversity in the Auburn community.

After living in the United States for 12 years, Yesenia Flores decided 18 months ago to return to the southern Mexico city of Veracruz.

“The time was right to go back,” Flores explained in Spanish, as translated by Jay Ostos, a leader of the Latino community.

She took her two American-born sons – Moses Rosales, 9, and Set Rosales, 6 – with her, hoping to forge a better life for her young family in the country of her birth.

The time, however, was not right. As bad as the economy was in the U.S at the time, things were much, much worse in Mexico.

“It was bad in Mexico, the economy, the violence,” she said. “It’s really hard to find a job there. I couldn’t find a job anywhere.”

While living in the United States, she had worked at a tortilla factory and as a store clerk. But in Mexico, there was nothing, no way to support her family, no way to provide a future for her boys. So she moved back to Auburn.

“It’s way, way different here,” said Ostos, a pastor and the manager of the Continental Village Apartments. “In Mexico, you can go to school and learn a career, but if you don’t know anybody who is in a higher place, you can’t work. Plus, it’s really more expensive to live in Mexico than to live here.”

Ostos said that a typical worker in Mexico might earn about 100 pesos, roughly $10 a day.

“If you go to a store and buy a whole chicken, it’s about 89 pesos (roughly $9 dollars),” Ostos said. “You work all day just for a chicken. It’s not easy.”

To make it worse, Flores said, her oldest son, Moses, was having health problems owing to poor conditions in the school he was attending in Veracruz.

“In Mexico, because he has asthma, I was pushing the school district to clean the classrooms,” Flores said. “He was suffering bad because of the condition of the school. They weren’t clean.”

Just this summer, Ostos said, six or seven new families have moved into the Continental Village apartment complex in South Auburn, all from Latin American countries, all seeking opportunity.

“A lot of them have come to Washington because the economy, communities and schools are better,” Ostos said.

In the last few years, the Auburn School District has seen an explosion in the number of immigrant and non-English speaking students, said Julie DeBolt, Coordinator of Assessments, No Child Left Behind and Native American Education.

“We have over 50 languages spoken in our schools,” DeBolt said. “In terms of languages spoken at homes with families, we have 22 percent of the kids in the district whose families speak a language other than English.”

During the 2009-2010 school year, the Auburn School District was 58-percent white, 18-percent Hispanic, 12-percent Asian, 8 percent African-American, 3-percent American Indian or Alaskan-native, and 1-percent Asian-Pacific Islander.

“It’s definitely made a difference in how educators have to approach their classrooms in terms of some of our school populations,” DeBolt said. “Some of them are now approaching half of their kids not speaking English as their first language. Pioneer Elementary is about 44-percent, we call it ELL, English Language Learners, or second language learners. For more than one-in-three kids, English is not their first language, so it’s definitely had a high impact on teachers.”

To help teachers effectively communicate with and teach students, the district has charted several courses of action.

“Teachers are working within their classrooms, learning new strategies on how to teach the same content, but with the impacted language groups,” DeBolt said. “Over the last three years, we’ve been training teachers in something called Project GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition Development).”

Additionally, fellow teachers coach them in lessons created for non native-English-speaking children.

“We’ll have a real focus in the next two years on how to get all staff trained in ELL best practices and how to work with ELL populations,” she said.

Wider ethnicity

Although the district sees increases across the board, including a burgeoning number of students from Eastern European, African, Asian and East Indian nations, the Hispanic population is the fastest growing, DeBolt said.

“In 2000, the population (of Hispanics in the district) was about 6-percent,” DeBolt said. “It’s tripled in the last 10 years.”

In addition to the difficulties inherent in teaching an English-based curriculum to Spanish-speaking pupils, teachers must also communicate with parents, who often know even less English than their children. To tackle the issue, the district offers workshops to help teachers learn conversational Spanish.

“It teaches educators how to ask basic questions in Spanish in case the family comes in,” she said. “We offer that once or twice a year as a training opportunity. The teachers will walk out of that, maybe not being able to have a conversation but being able to get the basic understanding and communication across.”

The challenges that confront the district as it deals with changing demographics do not end with language barriers.

DeBolt said the district must also bridge cultural differences.

“In the past, the district has offered panel discussions featuring community members,” she said. “They talked about different aspects, like what the expectations are about eye contact, even writing someone’s name in a red pen.”

In the Korean culture, writing someone’s name in red ink means that person is dead or about to die. Writing a healthy, living person’s name in red ink is often perceived as a threat.

“There are a lot of different cultural implications that as Americans we don’t think of as having a different impact,” DeBolt said.

According to Ostos, the district is doing a good job acknowledging the Hispanic culture.

“My experience with Pioneer and Olympic (Middle School) is that they’re doing a great job bringing people from all the countries together,” Ostos said. “The school allows us to bring our Latino festivals to the community, which we’ve done a lot. They support any activity that shows our culture. The teachers never come between students and their culture, they try to keep it going, while making them understand they are also learning a new culture. So that’s good, they’re finding a balance.”

In a couple weeks, Moses Rosales begins third grade at Pioneer Elementary, where he’d been in the first grade before the family’s move to Mexico.

“It was hard, but I liked the way the teachers treated me, the support they had for me,” Rosales said through the interpreter. “It made me feel good. When I started in school, I learned English really fast. I didn’t use my Spanish much at school.”

His English needs some work, he admits, but he’s eager to learn.

“I like science and math,” Rosales said. “And my plan is to become a chef.”

Rapid changes

While the district acknowledges the difficulties it faces as Auburn changes, its commitment to educating the future generation of Americans never waivers.

“I think our challenge is that the demographics are changing faster than we can really keep up with delivery of professional development,” DeBolt said. “The number of cultures that we have in the community is now so high that it’s really difficult for any individual teacher to know everything about every culture at any given moment. Our goal is for every student to meet the standards of the state and the federal requirements in terms of reading and math and writing and science proficiency, and treating each student individually, so we meet their learning needs and address what their goals are from K-12.”

For Flores, it’s all about the simple dream of providing the most opportunity she can for her boys.

“I want them to become educated and see them accomplish their goals, whatever they want to do,” she said.