CRETE, Neb. - Maribel Lopez's classmates worried about things like making friends or whether they could stomach the cafeteria food. But the first-grader had more pressing concerns when she came to school here five years ago from Mexico.

"She didn't know how to ask to go to the bathroom," said her mother, Maria Lopez, through an interpreter, "so she would just come home."

Her story is illustrative of that of thousands of Hispanic immigrants who are attracted to jobs at meatpacking plants in small towns in rural states.

And many Hispanic students who have flooded some rural districts often begin school without knowing English and with gaps in their education because of a migrant life.

Teachers trying to bridge the language and culture gap say the work is challenging and gratifying.

"The parents and kids are grateful," said Crete high school teacher Lisa Beckenhauer. "It's the best job in the district, because they come in wanting to learn."

While Lopez doesn't recall with fondness those days when her daughter first attended school in Crete, she glows when she continues her story: Her daughter, now 11, eventually learned to speak fluent English with help from the local schools. So did her son Jesus, 9, whose new language skills have helped propel him to the top tier of his class.

And Lopez herself is learning English in adult classes offered by the small-town school district that, like others, has been forced out of the business of solely educating kids who speak the same language and have similar backgrounds.

In Nebraska, the percentage of students like Maribel Lopez - called an English-language learner, or ELL, in educational lexicon - has risen about 360 percent over the past decade.

That's roughly triple the increase nationally.

The same trend holds true in Iowa, which has 151 percent more ELL students and 591 percent more Hispanic students than it did 10 years ago.

During the same period in Kansas, the number of ELL students increased about 137 percent.

Changing demographics increasingly make ELL more than an educational niche, and some states are struggling to keep up.

In Kansas, "I'd use the word `crisis"' to describe that state's shortage of bilingual teachers for ELL students, said Melanie Stuart, the ELL coordinator for the Kansas Department of Education.

Nebraska faces similar problems, and some education officials hold up Crete as a model.

Crete teachers used to complain about the influx of immigrants in the district. The Farmland pork processing plant, where Lopez's husband came looking for work five years ago, employs nearly 2,000 people, many of them Hispanic. Crete's population is about 6,000.

The school district has 940 percent more Hispanic students now than it did 10 years ago, and fewer white students.

"I have a 16-year-old that can't speak English and has a third-grade education, and you want me to teach them the American Revolution?" Crete Superintendent Kyle McGowan recalled a teacher saying about five years ago.

The district responded by organizing a meeting where Hispanic parents told teachers why they came to the U.S. In some cases, it was to escape desperate poverty and oppression.

"There were tears," said McGowan.

Now, the district has kindergarten teachers who can write in their students' native language to communicate with parents. About half the elementary teachers can carry on a conversation in Spanish. The district hired a counselor who deals solely with ELL children. And the majority of elementary teachers have taken three years of Spanish classes before immersing themselves in the language during a trip to Costa Rica as part of a project to improve ELL education.

"They learned the difficulty of, and to empathize with the difficulty of living in a country with a different language," McGowan said. "We could put ourselves in the place of students and understand what was happening."

The efforts to meet their students halfway earned the respect of Hispanic parents, said McGowan, and they have responded with better attendance at parent-teacher meetings and other school functions.

Children who don't speak English as their first language often struggle in rural school districts, which lack the bilingual teachers more common in urban areas, said Pedro Ruiz, president of the National Association for Bilingual Education.

Bilingual teachers provide a support system that helps students learn English, Ruiz said. Though they have non-English speakers, some of Nebraska's smaller districts don't have any ELL teachers. Reasons vary from a lack of money to too few students to justify a program, according to Nancy Rowch, who helps direct state ELL programs in Nebraska.

The same holds true in Kansas.

Larger towns where Hispanics have been commonplace for years tend to have quality ELL programs, while others struggle with a lack of bilingual teachers, Stuart said.

Educators say bilingual teachers allow students to grasp their subject matter while learning the language.

Inside her Crete High School classroom, Beckenhauer alternates between English and Spanish to teach students their lessons.

A grammar lesson, for instance, is taught in English, but when she senses the students don't understand what she is trying to teach, she briefly switches to Spanish.

When students complete a written quiz at their desks, a teaching assistant who is a native Spanish speaker bounces from desk to desk, helping students understand what is asked of them.

Crete now has programs to teach residents about how to become American citizens and English classes for adults to try to connect the district to the new families as a whole, instead of just the students.

There is a waiting list of mostly Hispanics wanting to enroll in the English classes.

And while a recent survey shows longtime residents have been slow to accept their new neighbors, statistics suggest the influx of Hispanics could be an antidote for a rural population decline.

The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, estimates that Hispanics account for 70 percent of overall population growth in Nebraska the past five years. In Kansas, iconic Wild West towns such as Dodge City now resemble "little Mexico," Stuart said.

Jan Sears, director of special programs for Crete Public Schools, said the new residents are eager to fit in.

"You can walk Main Street and find people that will make derogatory comments" about Hispanics, she said. "But when people say (the immigrants) aren't willing to learn English, it couldn't be further from the truth."