Reply to Who said there isn't a North-South divide?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Many Spanish speaking immigrant kids do not read or write Spanish. There is a significant number on non Spanish speaking kids on the west pike.

So, if immersion is moved to the west pike, you expect low income families to bus their kids all the way to Ashlawn??? Isn’t that just busing???? Take away all the neighborhood schools in the poorest section of town so then you have to bus kids to wealthy north Arlington!!! Isn’t that what the school board and activists have said will NOT happen? Talento will never go for that.

UMC families along the pike would love that option. But not sure Ashlawn can take that many kids. [/quote]

The highest concentrations of Spanish at home speakers is the western pike. I don't know what "many" or significant means to describe speakers of other languages, but their number is certainly dwarfed by Spanish speakers, especially on the western pike.

I think you need to look at the moving of immersion schools not just as an exercise in "cracking" high poverty pockets but also of drawing well resourced middle and upper middle class families in. The idea is to make it appealing to low income speakers for reasonable not just of language and proximity, but also resources. That is how key began, before the surrounding neighborhood became super wealthy and lost most of its nearby Spanish speakers.

Would love to see a breakdown from APS on languages spoken at home. Aps is very fond of citing the "over 100-some languages" factoid but census figures make it pretty obvious that we're talking about mostly Spanish speakers with a smattering of others. Furthermore, native speakers of languages other than Spanish tend to, but of course not always, be of a higher SES strata than Spanish speakers - it's harder to get here from Asia, for example, and those that make the journey tend to have more resources.

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My kids went to Drew and there were kids there from an enormous number of countries, including many in Africa and south Asia, and they spoke many languages other than English at home, although most of their parents spoke at least some English. Lots of kids whose parents drove taxis, worked in restaurants, worked in hotels--not exactly higher SES strata. I imagine thats the case at other south Arlington schools as well. 
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