By Brigid Schulte and Dan Keating
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 2, 2001; Page A13

On a rainy spring afternoon, it was time for reading in a fourth-grade class at Rock View Elementary School, but Samuel Choto colored and drew pictures of animals
instead.

"He can't speak English so good," a classmate explained. "So the teacher lets us draw pictures of book covers."

Next came a spelling test. As other students diligently scribbled the words, Samuel tapped his pencil on his empty desk and stared out the window.

Samuel's parents said they were drawn to Montgomery County for the same reason families have pointed to for decades -- the promise of first-rate schools. They
emigrated from El Salvador last year and speak little or no English, and they struggle to make ends meet.

Samuel, a shy 10-year-old, is one of 8,000 county schoolchildren who get special instruction because they speak little or no English.

The number of languages spoken by Montgomery County schoolchildren has grown from just a handful 30 years ago to 122 today.

Samuel's teacher at the Kensington school, Nikki Tabron, speaks no Spanish. Instead, Tabron relies on other children, some of whom have been in this country only
slightly longer than Samuel, to translate her lessons.

"It's very new to me," said Tabron, who has been a teacher for three years. "It's challenging for me to keep them occupied."

Like most of the county's classroom teachers, Tabron has not received special training in educating children who aren't fluent in English.

Nearly 30,000 low-income children live in "the stripe," as educators call the jagged-edged corridor that runs through the heart of the county, straddling major bus and
Metro routes.

School Superintendent Jerry D. Weast said that 10,000 of those children don't speak English well. The 11,000 low-income Latino children comprise the largest poor
ethnic group in the system, surpassing blacks for the first time this year.

Some principals blame flagging test scores on the influx of non-English speakers, such as Samuel, rather than on the number of lower-income pupils in their school.

But The Washington Post's analysis found that schools with high concentrations of poor students performed the worst, regardless of whether they have many
non-English speakers.

In schools where poverty has grown the fastest in the past five years -- by as much as 16 percent in some cases -- test scores have also dropped.

In inner cities, low test scores at high-poverty schools are attributed to a culture of failure, uninvolved parents, low expectations, a lack of role models and too many
inexperienced, uncertified or uninspired teachers.

Although wealthy, suburban Montgomery County is vastly different from impoverished inner cities, in some respects its high-poverty schools are not. Teacher
turnover tends to be higher and teachers younger, an internal school study found. Far fewer advanced courses are offered. And some principals report that they
spend as much time on social work as on education.

"The school becomes a focal point of the community," said Diana Wollin, principal at nearby Oakland Terrace Elementary School in Silver Spring, where the number
of children living below the poverty line has risen 50 percent in the past five years. "People ask us where they can get mortgage money, who to call when their dog
runs away. Sometimes I think it's wonderful they trust us. But it's just constant."

Rock View Principal Pat Dixon said her school staff has delivered mattresses to children without beds and sent home thermometers with sick children. They have
collected hats and mittens for children who don't own them.

"When children are constantly late for school, we often find they don't have alarm clocks," Dixon said. "So we go buy them."

Neither of Samuel Choto's parents speaks English. His father, Macario Choto, who was a farmhand, handyman and seafood peddler in El Salvador, now works as
an evening janitor at a gym in Wheaton for $6 an hour. Samuel's mother is illiterate in Spanish and cannot read the notices Samuel brings home.

But the Chotos appreciate the value of education.

"We came here for the opportunities and because I heard the schools were the best," Macario Choto said in an interview at his home. "I tell the children, 'You better
study.' For Samuel, maybe one day he can become a traffic policeman."

The eight members of the Choto family live in a small brick home they share with three other families -- 14 people in all.

One evening, traffic pounded by on Veirs Mill Road just outside the living-room window. As the sun set, the room grew dark. There were no lights. The children vied
for one of the four seats around a brown Formica table in the dining room to do their homework. Samuel wanted to do his math homework, but he couldn't
understand the English directions. And no one at home could help him.

"It's difficult for the children," his father said. "Sometimes, it's almost like a blank day, because they don't understand the language."

At school, Samuel joined other non-English speakers in a daily 30-minute session with a language teacher, which was sometimes skipped for band practice or
assemblies. The rest of the day, he was in the regular classroom, where he routinely was unable to participate.

When asked how he felt when he was given nothing meaningful to do in class, he lowered his eyes and whispered, "Poquito mal."