When Yves Raymond began teaching 30 years ago, he planned to work in education until retirement. Last year, Raymond's long career as an educator came to an abrupt end when Department of Education officials decided to do away with the automatic assignment of students with limited English skills to a bilingual program.

"I thought I was useful to the Haitian students, but there is no need anymore," Raymond, of Brooklyn said. "I don't feel I wanted to stay in the system where I was a high-paid substitute, especially in my last year."

Raymond retired in November from his position as a substitute teacher. He had also left three years ago his position as a Creole bilingual coordinator at Erasmus High School after 23 years. He is one of 15 certified Creole bilingual teachers whose careers have come to an end with the advent of smaller, specialty schools created to improve school performances and to increase attendance. Haitian immigrant children are now dispersed throughout the system, and no longer form the ethnic cohorts they once did. Parents who just move to the United States and are looking to enroll their kids have to search many districts before finding a school that fits their children's need.

Today, 12 new small schools have replaced three major high schools in Districts 17, 18, and 19 in Brooklyn where a majority of Creole-speaking Haitian students live. They no longer offer bilingual programs including Creole, which results in the decline of enrollment of Haitian immigrant with no knowledge of English and children out of school for the first semester because their parents did not find the proper school for them.

In Brooklyn's Erasmus High School alone about 900 places in bilingual and ESL classes have been lost, said Raymond.

"The small schools don't have the numbers anymore to offer the bilingual program," explained Raymond, who also taught chemistry at the school.

A call made to the DOE sends immigrant parents to a placement center in their area that does not provide the proper language help for their minority children. After spending 30 minutes on the phone on a recent Monday, one parent, an East Flatbush resident, was given four placement centers after explaining that she needed to place her 12-year-old boy in school. She will have to go to PS 159, PS 315, the school of Science and Technology and another enrollment center in district 22 in the Canarsie area.

Bilingual programs have long been plagued by controversy. While there has never been any irrefutable proof that they are the best way to teach immigrant children English, still some educators and advocates for bilingual education continue to argue that the English-only approach fails children. They insist that programs that develop children's native-language skills show beneficial effects both on their English-language development and on overall academic achievement.      

"It is important to have a transition period. When the child becomes comfortable it is easier to try to adapt," Raymond said. "At beginning, you want the communication between the child and the parent to continue."

By law, schools need 15 to 20 children to start a bilingual class. Immigrant students now receive ESL instruction briefly, with sessions as short as 15 minutes for a small group or a little extra attention in the classroom, all from a teacher unlicensed in ESL.

"Bilingual programs provide the cultural, linguistic, and psychological support a child needs to adapt in the new school system and continue learning without interruption," said Jean Plaisir, an education professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, who still teaches bilingual education to student teachers. His students range from teachers in early childhood to college.

On the front lines of the bilingual program elimination is the former Erasmus High School, long time stronghold that catered to a large population of Haitian children, in Flatbush – the heart of the city's Haitian enclave. The school, largely West Indian and black, has been dismantled into five small schools, none of which offer a bilingual program for Creole speaking students.

Like Erasmus, Prospect Heights and Tilden High schools also had in the past large contingents of Haitian children forming a critical mass that qualified the schools to operate a bilingual program in Creole. Plaisir said that students in the programs routinely outperformed peers at other schools on standardized tests.

"The majority of children in the New York City public school system come from immigrant backgrounds," Plaisir said. "It is the state's responsibility to provide an education to those children."

States and the federal governments balked at continuing to fund bilingual education after numerous problems with the programs came to light in 2000. The city's bilingual education program was found to have substandard teaching and children who stayed too long in that category. That year, anti-bilingual initiatives were passed in New York, California, Colorado, Arizona and Massachusetts.

"A good bilingual program tries to reach a balance and create a bilingual and multicultural child who, at the end, will be good for the country," Raymond said.          

Another fault with the bilingual program was its enrolling of children born in the United States who critics said should have been placed in regular all-English classes.

Fredline Blanc, 18, has been enrolled in a Creole bilingual program since she was four years old because her parents are Haitian. Program coordinators in her school place her now in an ESL program after being for years in a Creole bilingual program. 

"The classes in Creole did not help me," said Blanc, who was born in Haiti and took the mandated Creole class for 12 years. "The ESL really helps me with my English."

Blanc is now a senior at Sheepshead Bay High School and is still obligated to take English as a Second Language classes. She will continue taking the class until her college years if she does not pass an English proficient exam in May.

Twenty-one-year-old Sterline Mary Cevile, a Junior in college, was born in the United States but spent three years in a bilingual education program.        

"Being in the bilingual program had helped me explain to my parents in Creole how to help me with my homework," she said.          

Department of Education Officials said most Haitian students are in ESL programs, at schools that receive extra funding to educate them.         

"Parents have the choice to ask the school for the type of English Language Learner program they want for their children," DOE spokeswoman Melody Meyer said.

 "There will always be pupils who need bilingual support in the country. Those children will not disappear. They [the DOE] will have a problem on their hands," Plaisir said.        

After spending more than 20 years at Erasmus and three years as a mentor in region 3, Raymond was tired of spot filling for absent teachers at the new small school that could not afford to hire him despite his long experience.        

"When you are teaching bilingual classes you feel you are doing something extra. You feel you are helping. That was gratifying," he said.