January 23, 2005: Headlines: Elementary Education: Hispanic Issues: Bi-lingual Education: The Santa Fe New Mexican: RPCV David Call said the school plans to add a new grade level each year so this year's dual-language kindergartners will move into a new dual- language first-grade class next fall

Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Peace Corps Library: Hispanic Studies: January 23, 2005: Index: PCOL Exclusive: Hispanic Issues and Hispanic Studies : January 23, 2005: Headlines: Elementary Education: Hispanic Issues: Bi-lingual Education: The Santa Fe New Mexican: RPCV David Call said the school plans to add a new grade level each year so this year's dual-language kindergartners will move into a new dual- language first-grade class next fall

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RPCV David Call said the school plans to add a new grade level each year so this year's dual-language kindergartners will move into a new dual- language first-grade class next fall

RPCV David Call said the school plans to add a new grade level each year so this year's dual-language kindergartners will move into a new dual- language first-grade class next fall

RPCV David Call said the school plans to add a new grade level each year so this year's dual-language kindergartners will move into a new dual- language first-grade class next fall

LANGUAGE PROGRAMS: ONE SCHOOL STRUGGLES, ANOTHER MOVES AHEAD

Jan 23, 2005

The Santa Fe New Mexican

One morning at Agua Fra Elementary School, kindergartners sat on a brightly colored floor mat as their teacher, David Call, read to them in Spanish about the adventures of Corduroy, a teddy bear accidentally left behind at the Laundromat.

Call, a tall, thin, former Peace Corps volunteer, asked the children about their own experiences doing laundry with their parents. Later, the students created books of words beginning with vowels, such as "el-e-fan-te," a word that's a lot easier to spell than its

English equivalent.

While Nava Elementary School has struggled to keep its dual- language program alive, Agua Fra introduced its first dual-language class last fall.

Call said the school plans to add a new grade level each year so this year's dual-language kindergartners will move into a new dual- language first-grade class next fall. Assistant principal Mike Rodriguez, whose daughter is in Call's class, believes Agua Fra's program can succeed because he already has a core group of bilingual teachers on board who are excited about the project.

Parents at the school have a choice of programs, and those who opt for the dual-language program are asked to make a long-term commitment. While some of Call's students speak Spanish at home, eight spoke no Spanish before starting the class. Halfway through the school year, 80 percent of the kindergartners are reading and writing in Spanish, and Call expects all of the students to be doing so by the end of the year. As the students advance in grade, more English will be introduced, until instruction reaches a 50-50 balance.

The reason for starting off with more Spanish, Call said, is that English is the dominant language in Santa Fe and children are exposed to it outside of school.

Turning the tide

Rodriguez hopes to see both academic and social benefits from the program. Like many other Hispanic teachers and administrators who grew up in Santa Fe, he didn't learn Spanish as a child.

"I think our parents thought they would cause us less pain by avoiding it," Rodriguez said.

But now Rodriguez's daughter can communicate with her great- grandmother. "That gives me a good feeling," he said.

Over at Chaparral Elementary School, Principal Teresa Ulibarri has been trying to learn everything she can about dual-language models with hopes of introducing a program at her school.

Ulibarri has seen an increase in the number of Spanish-speaking students enrolling in her school. Although she says the school has a relatively luxurious number of bilingual teachers -- one for each grade level -- she and her staff don't consider their current bilingual program to be working well.

Learning together

Across the district, English-language learners fall well behind the student population as a whole on standardized tests. According to

the district's current data, only

23 percent of fourth-grade English-language learners were proficient in language arts in 2003-2004, compared to 49 percent of the total fourth-grade population. Ulibarri said such disparities are true at her school as well.

Ulibarri, who says her parents "spoke Spanish to each other in front of us kids when they wanted to keep a secret," believes a dual- language program would create bridges between children who are socially divided by language. "If you put these groups of students together, they will learn from each other," Ulibarri said. "That's our hope and dream."

Her staff went on field trips to study dual-language immersion at Dolores Gonzales Elementary School in Albuquerque and came back gung- ho about the possibilities.

But her enthusiasm is tempered by the questions she still has. "Is this what the community wants? Will the district support it? Can we achieve sustainability?" She says she hasn't talked to administrators at Nava but wants to know more about what happened there. "You can't build a program from a theory," she mused.

Or, as her colleague Andrea Tashan, who was assistant principal of Adobe Acres, a school in Albuquerque's South Valley with a dual- language program, before becoming principal of E.J. Martinez Elementary this year, put it, "It's pie in the sky, unless you have the resources."

Ulibarri said she wants to hear from the district before moving forward.

"We're waiting to have a heavy-duty conversation with Catherine Collins," the district's bilingual coordinator, Ulibarri said. "We need the support of the district."





When this story was posted in February 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:

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Story Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Elementary Education; Hispanic Issues; Bi-lingual Education

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