Reply to What do you think of Spanish immersion?

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[quote=Anonymous]I have kids in a majority minority school in FCPS.  The largest group is Hispanic.  The school also has a partial Spanish immersion program.  Half the kids speak Spanish at home, half the kids speak English.  One of my kids is in the program, another one started in the program but was identified with learning disabilities and at the end of that school year we took him out of the program (he's still at that school, just not in the immersion program).  Kids with LD are capable of learning a foreign language but special ed is in English, not the foreign language and we felt he had enough challenges without having to try and keep up in the foreign language.  My kids are in elementary school.  My DH's cousin also has kids that went through the immersion program, they're now in high school.

We're very happy with the program but it's not for every child and it's not for every parent.  In my experience, the teachers aren't always the 'best' (then, again, your child may not be assigned to the best teacher in the grade anyway) and if your DC tests into the AAP classes, you're going to have to chose between immersion and AAP - although differentiated instruction will be offered.  Also, it seems the class sizes are larger.  For us, foreign language fluency is more important than AAP.  Our rationale was that if our DC needed additional assistance in an academic area or needed greater challenges, we could always supplement with tutoring.  But, that's not been the case.  Her progress is pretty much what we expected but we also think she's the kind of kid who would have thrived in just about any environment.

Our DS with the LD would not have thrived in any environment.  He needs the small, intense, repetitive environment of the special ed classroom.  He's very smart but learning isn't easy for him.  His general ed classrooms tend to have fewer students than the immersion classrooms and by the time he hit 3rd grade, there's no way he would have been at grade level math if it had been taught in Spanish.  School generates enough anxiety for him when it's taught in English, I can only imagine how his anxiety would sky rocket if we'd made him continue in Spanish.

Our cousins with the high school kids are very happy they did it.  Their kids aren't at a level with native speakers but they speak quite well, their accents are excellent and they've excelled academcally.  HTH [/quote]

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