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Programs created specifically to serve students for whom English is a second language account for much of this extra cost.

This year, nearly $45 million of the $6 billion appropriated by the General Assembly for public schools went to English as a Second Language programs.

The bulk of that goes to hiring bilingual teachers. Other costs include translating documents and training teachers how to instruct students who speak little English.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act forced schools to look closely at how immigrant students fare in public schools. Since 2002, the law has required schools to show improvement in the test scores of students who speak English as a second language.

"It's made us much more aware of those students and how well they're performing," said Jim Causby, former Johnston County school superintendent and now director of the N.C. Association of School Administrators.

The federal law also set stricter teacher standards that have made ESL teachers scarce in North Carolina. Johnston offers a $1,500 bonus for new ESL teachers and recruits many of them from other countries through the Visiting International Faculty program.

The international teachers are highly qualified and often speak Spanish. By law, however, they can stay for no more than three years, forcing districts to pay out more bonuses.

Sanders, known to her students as "Miss Ana," came to Four Oaks from Brazil through the international program seven years ago. She married, became a permanent legal resident and stayed on to develop Four Oaks' ESL program -- a central part of a school-reform program that is the pride of the county. The school is a sprawling brick building at the end of Main Street in this town of about 1,600 residents. More than 1,000 students attend, drawn from a wide swath of rural Johnston County.

A banner across its entrance boasts "Honor School of Excellence," the highest designation in the state ABCs program.

The ESL program at Four Oaks exemplifies the preferred instruc-tional method in North Carolina, which puts learning English second to learning grade-level material.

ESL students learn math, science, social studies and language arts in classes taught entirely in English. For an hour of every day, Sanders helps teach these classes, translating and stepping in to help the Spanish-speaking students.

In these "inclusion classes," English-speaking students are hand-picked -- with parents' consent -- to learn alongside the ESL students; ideally, a third of a class will be ESL students, another third academically gifted students and the rest mainstream students.

All ESL students take a separate daily class with Sanders on reading, writing and speaking English. Though these classes are also primarily in English, they are geared to Spanish-speakers.

Sanders holds extra sessions with students whose English is particularly weak, and a teacher's assistant doubles as a translator to work with parents, who often speak little or no English, and students who need extra help.

Most elementary-age students pick up the language quickly -- usually within two years, Sanders said. Once fluent, they no longer take special classes, though she still tracks their progress.

Since there are no classes in Spanish, schools rely heavily on bilingual staff such as Sanders to help immigrant students through the day until they learn English.

"One day we are psychiatrists, one day we're nurses," Sanders said. "If there is some reason the parents need to be involved, we have to step in."

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