Interview Transcript
Mary Kitto
Q:
A: Esther is a wonderful student, she is very high academically, so she works all in English in the classroom. She is above grade level as far as reading goes, she's a very strong phonetic reader, struggles a little bit more with comprehension, which is natural for a second language learner. She has more struggle with learning the vocabulary but can read anything. She is wonderful writer, she writes great stories. Math, she struggles a little bit more with the harder concepts and again, that's pretty natural. She is very cooperative, all the children love her and love braiding her long, beautiful hair. She is pretty quiet and pretty shy, but extremely helpful and loving, she gives me lots of nice hugs.
Q: What kind of support do you get from her family?
A: Her parents are very supportive of Esther's education. They come to our parent-teacher conferences, that we meet twice a year. I communicate through a newsletter to them both in English and in Spanish once a week. And I know that they read them because they ask questions from time to time. They come in to school, I see them about once a week, they peek their head in either with their son Daniel or just to say hi. We work together on things like getting her to wear her glasses, the natural kid things.
Q: Could you talk about the challenge to this school and to the school district of having so many initially non-English-speaking children?
A: Our school right now is going through major adjustment becoming, not just the school, the whole community is struggling with becoming a multicultural city, and we find the same struggle here at the school. Our numbers have risen to I think around 20% and a lot of the children coming into school are first generation Spanish speakers and so we are not at this point, equipped with having more bilingual educators, and we often act in kind of a triage mentality of: the children arrive and then we struggle and figure out how to best meet their needs. I prefer to work with the children in an inclusion setting, so working within the classroom and bringing bilingual educators inside. But we need more staffing in order to do that better.
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