Bilingual Center To Be Housed On Queen Anne

Seattle school officials have decided to move the district's middle- and high-school Bilingual Orientation Center (BOC) from the former Sharples Junior High School building in the South End to the original John Hay Elementary building on Queen Anne Hill.

The move will split the 200-student BOC from the similarly sized Sharples Alternative Secondary School. That program, along with the district's school for teenage parents and a re-entry program for youngsters who've been expelled, will move to the current South Shore Middle School building in Rainier Beach.

Newly arrived immigrants and other children still in the early stages of learning English attend the BOC for a semester or a year before they're assigned to regular schools.

Yesterday's decisions by Superintendent Joseph Olchefske follow the district's earlier decision to move South Shore students to Sharples so the school can expand from about 635 students to as many as 1,000 students in the next few years.

The late Superintendent John Stanford decided that South Shore should move after a report by Principal Bi Hoa Caldwell in fall 1997 that the so-called open plan of the school was noisy and exacerbated the typical middle-school discipline problems.

Advocacy groups for immigrants, and nearly all of the BOC's teachers and teachers's aides, lobbied hard against moving the BOC program to South Shore for the same reason. Noise due to the open plan - in which classroom walls don't reach the high ceilings - would make teaching English difficult, they said.

Behavioral problems among the alternative high school and re-entry program students have also created conflicts between those programs and the BOC, another reason the bilingual teachers wanted to go to a different site.

Olchefske's decision also includes a plan to at least partly solve the noise problems at South Shore. Next school year Dunlap Elementary School will share South Shore with the alternative high school while a new elementary school is built. But before Dunlap moves in, money for interim school sites from the construction program will be used to divide South Shore and enclose classrooms, according to Trevor Neilson, district spokesman.

With the building modifications done, South Shore also will be the interim site for Emerson Elementary, which will be rebuilt during the 2000-01 school year, said Neilson.

The original John Hay building, 411 Boston St. on Queen Anne Hill, was built in 1903 and replaced on a different block in 1988.

There's a downside to moving the BOC from the South End to Queen Anne, however, according to Lenora Lee, the program's head teacher.

The old Hay building has no gymnasium and its location means middle-school kids with little English skills will have to transfer buses downtown if they stay after school for enrichment programs. Dick Lilly's phone message number is 206-464-2479. His e-mail address is dlilly@seattletimes.com