SJCC is one of the four colleges and five adult education schools that participate in the SBCAE (south bay consortium adult education).

“SJCC has established a MOU (memorandum of understanding) which acts as a bridge between the SJCC ESL curriculum and the ESL curriculum offered at the Adult Education centers who participate in the SBCAE” said ESL instructor Novella Simonson.

Enrollment in the SJCC free no credit ESL program is being offered to everyone who first qualifies for the program through the SBCAE or any other qualified source, such as private schools such as the Campbell Adult and Community Education Center.

“A separate application is administered by SJCC for free no credit students but the standard placement test for all ESL students is still used to asses the students current level of competency” said Monique Rodarte of the Language Arts Department.

There are three free no credit career technical education (CTE) classes being offered at SJCC; ESL in health care, ESL for computers and computing, and ESL for the workplace. There are five free no credit courses being offered to ESL students to bridge the gap between ESL students and mainstream English students.

The five standard free no credit ESL courses offered are ESL 531 Listening and Speaking, ESL 532 Reading and Writing, ESL 323 Reading and Vocabulary Development, ESL 322 Paragraph Development and ESL 542 Intermediate Level Grammar.

“The free no credit ESL program benefits the resident status students in three ways; in most cases it eliminates the 1 year resident requirement, it allows the students to enroll at the normal tuition rate, and it allows immigrant students to apply for other college programs available such as financial aid,” said Simonson.

Sparkpoint acts as the hub for the SBCAE and can be found at http.opendoorsouthbay.org

“ESL 324 has great worth for us because we are being prepared for higher education,” said Carlos Alvarado an ESL student.