Reply to Spanish Immersion Community Table Session

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This all feels like another sign the immersion program isn't going to make it.

We turned down our neighborhood school and another lottery school at the start of K because we thought immersion was the way to go for our family. I have been second guessing myself for awhile. [/quote]

I don't get why people think this. The county and the schools in the past few years has been making huge strides to improve the immersion program. They got a new spanish curriculum, they moved to an 80/20 model, they started outreach to hispanic neighborhoods, they created a task force which made a number of recommendations that the county then adopted. They created new Spanish assessments to better evaluate where kids are. Basically, they have done a million things to support the program lately.  They are now moving it out of an overcrowded school to a school with a higher hispanic population and new facilities. WHY is that a sign that the program is not going to make it?[/quote]

I am not PP. Not sure if those million things they started to do is going to fix some of the kids who are in 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th grade who started under a different curriculum and have had to (if they are lucky enough) get extra support, tutors and go through summer school to try and catch up to grade level. I have zero data to prove it, I just know multiple families along with ours, who have had to provide a lot of extra support over the years. Some have left and some will leave after 5th because of it. Hopefully getting rid of the old curriculum and how they were teaching reading will help along with the 80/20 model. I don't think the program isn't going to make it but there's a lot of feedback from families who are not thrilled with the program. Maybe it's just the circle I'm in or our school, like I said, I don't have data. Just experience with the families I know who attend Immersion. 
[/quote]

Surely I will be torched--but, I mean, the elephant in the room here to me is the time spent in virtual school for immersion kids. I would suggest that the immersion program is theoretically the most rigorous elementary program in APS because kids are working to learn all foundational concepts in two languages. And yet, from where I sit, with a 4th grader (who was in kinder when Covid hit) in one of the immersion programs, there has been ZERO dedicated effort to provide any additional support to these kids from the school system. We have supplemented across the board for several years--and yes, this is a privilege, but, our DC is still struggling. And what about all of the kids who cannot independently access additional support? I've advocated to the school board and also emailed our school principal and raised the subject at the school, but, all I get is crickets and nothing changing. [/quote]

Oh I 100% agree that virtual education was a disaster for everything but an additional disaster for acquiring a new language. [/quote]

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