In Depth:

Shushanna Petrosyan wrapped up the Pledge of Allegiance and instructed everyone at a recent Glendale Unified School District Board of Education meeting to be seated.

“I’m in fifth grade at Horace Mann Elementary School,” she began.

Born in Armenia, Shushanna said she enrolled in Glendale Unified four years ago.

“I didn’t know a word of English,” she continued. “Three months later, I was speaking faster than all my friends.”

Glendale Unified is no stranger to students like Shushanna. Twenty-five percent of the district’s students are learning English as a second language, and another 39% have learned and worked their way into fluency, according to the district’s most recent language census report released in March 2009. Combined, 64% of the roughly 26,660 students are bilingual in the sixth-largest school district in Los Angeles County.

“That’s definitely on the high end,” said David Moguel, a professor at Cal State Northridge.

But on the other end of the spectrum are students who can never read at grade level fast enough — among the most vulnerable in the public education system. There is the immigrant eighth-grader who reads at a sixth-grade level, the 11th-grader, a refugee from a country at war, who can’t pass the high school exit exam because she can’t understand the English-only instructions. And there’s the 18-year-old who, also a recent immigrant, realizes he will never have enough credits to earn a traditional high school diploma.

It varies by campus, but the most prominent languages in Glendale Unified are Armenian, Spanish and Korean, officials said.

“I think English learners in general are very challenging in that they are coming here with such a variety of background, experience and language,” said Deb Rinder, principal of Glendale High School, where two-thirds of the student body is bilingual. “We have kids who have been in the country for two days and kids who are second generation. They are challenging to service.”

Keeping goals consistent

Even in kindergarten, children arrive with different language abilities, but the goals and standards are the same. The students should, among other things, know how to write and sound all 26 letters of the English alphabet before they enter first grade.