HOGAN: There are a couple of things from the Supreme Court decision that are notable from our standpoint. The Supreme Court could have ended the case, it did not. It remanded the case to the district court for further proceedings. To determine whether or not the state is now in compliance with the EEOA.
It is clear that funding is just one factor, that it is going to be very difficult to show inadequate funding because the supreme court has said you should look at all sources of funding available to a school district in order to make that assessment.
Where as before we had argued that state allocation per ELL students is what you should be looking at because otherwise you are forcing school districts to take money way from other general education programs to support ELL students. That is wrong as a policy matter and it is wrong as a matter of law. The Supreme Court, at least 5 of the justices did not agree with that but the more fundamental question is on remand whether or not the programs that are now in place, including the identification of ELL students, the assessments of ELL students and the actual instruction of ELL students complies to the EEOA. We will be taking the position on remand that they do not.
If you go back and look at the original district court decision that was issued in 2000, you can see the problems that were present in Nogales: over-crowded classrooms, not enough qualified teachers and on and on and on, over the following years a lot of funding was added to the system so that helped. There were changes in the administration, that helped, actually No Child Left Behind helped, to the extent that it required school districts to focus on ELLs and other students and start to measure their success in school.
The problem was that they were still not learning English certainly at the rate at that Arizona wanted them to learn at which, Arizona has a statutory law, reclassifying students within a year that was not happening and is not happening today.