ON MONDAY MORNING AUGUST 3, teacher Geri Haas, will face her new classroom of six and seven-year-olds. But for the first-grade Norwood Elementary school teacher, this class will be a little different and much more challenging to teach. While much of the teaching concepts will remain the same, Haas will be faced with the task of teaching non-English speaking students only in English.

Welcome to the first day of English-only instruction – the first day of Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual measure overwhelmingly approved by voters last month. For LAUSD’s year-around schools, Monday marks the first day of the new semester, which means these schools are the first scheduled to have their bilingual education programs replaced by English-only immersion instruction.

"We’re definitely going to have to take a different approach," Haas said. "We’re really going to have to build a fundamental oral language base and then shift to a thematic teaching approach."

Haas said that what English-only instruction will mean to her and other teachers who have non-English speaking students in class will be a shift to a "sheltered" teaching method, in which teachers use specific strategies to teach a specific content area, such as social studies or math, in ways comprehensible to the students while promoting their English language development. "We will be using a lot of visual aids, oral teaching, using manipulatives in math and reading aloud," she said.

Frances Goldman, the Title I coordinator at Norwood Elementary, said that she is unsure how the transition to English-only instruction will effect students or teachers.

"It’s really unknown at this point," Goldman said. "But we’re going to do the best we can. It’s going to be hard, but it’s not going to be impossible."

District officials predict that implementing English-only instruction will cost LAUSD about $40 million over the next four years with about $900,000 needed for start-up costs this year. The main costs will be in retraining teachers for English immersion instruction at more than 600 LAUSD schools and acquiring new books and other teaching materials, district officials said.