Reply to Bilingual Kids in Language Immersion ES Programs, Which Programs Have Many & Strive to Attract Them?

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[quote=Anonymous]At a recent Tyler Elementary open house (Capitol Hill), the principal made surprising statements about her Spanish immersion program that were music to my ears. Her remarks made me think of Yu Ying, how that school community's thinking about ethnic input to language immersion seem to be the [i] polar opposite [/i]of Tyler's.  I say this having persued most of the YY threads, and having attended open houses at the school.  Am I wrong?  I don't know much about how the leadership of DC's various PS language immersion programs approaches including bilingual children and parents in their school communities, but would be interesting in learning more.  [i]Which view is the norm, the Tyler view, the YY view, or something inbetween?  [/i]

I've heard that Oyster has a separate lottery for Spanish speakers, and that LAMB gives some sort of preferential treatment to them in admissions. We skipped the YY lottery because nobody there seemed to think that having our ethnic Chinese dialect-speaking kid in the school would benefit the program. The opposite, the principal and PA parents were snippy when we asked about bilingual issues. Our Chinese-American immigrant friends who also mainly speak a dialect at home avoid YY, or try it and leave, feeling like token ethnics there. YY's administrators flat out said that, academically, they would treat our dialect-speaking kid like a student who speaks no Chinese. Chinese teachers tell us that there are only one or two bilingual kids per grade.

Here's what the Tyler principal said (drawing from my notes):

*Tyler's language immersion program suffers from having few bilingual Spanish-speaking students and Latino immigrant families involved, a problem we are determined to correct. We wish to celebrate the DC Latino immigrant experience in our program.

*We have started to reach out to the Latino population of nearby neighborhoods to attract more bilingual children to our lottery.  And we are working with DCPS to set aside places for such children.  We are also moving to identify native Spanish speakers on our wait list and to move them to the top. Our PTA parents support this approach.

*We need more bilingual children in our program to model the language and culture for the other children. We believe that this is an essential component of a successful ES language immersion experience. Our teachers are concerned that our Spanish immersion students speak too much English amongst themselves outside of class, and are too far removed from Latino culture.  We want more Spanish-speaking English Language Learners at Tyler. Likewise, our PTA is determined to attract more ethnic Spanish-speaking parents.

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