News

Less affluent Bruce Drysdale fast becoming fluent in Spanish

Students in Cecilia Rosello’s kindergarten class are eager to answer the teacher’s questions.

By Taylor Wright, Published: May 17, 2016

Cecilia Rosello’s kindergarten class looks like a typical American classroom. But it doesn’t sound like one.

Rosello asks questions in Spanish. The children answer in Spanish. The kids sing a song to learn the names of fruit. “They really learn vocabulary from that,” she says to a visitor, the only time she speaks English. The kids happily sing along, raise their arms on cue, stand up, sit down.
Is this an English as a second language class? No. The class made up is (mostly) native English speakers, with Spanish gaining fast to become a tie for first.
Welcome to Bruce Drysdale Elementary School’s Spanish immersion program, one of the most successful innovations in Henderson County schools in recent years. Now in its fourth year, the program has led to higher test scores for both native English speakers and native Spanish speakers, broken down cultural barriers among brown, white and black children and made Bruce Drysdale something of a magnet school for parents who see great value in having their child become fluent in Spanish.
“When we birth these kids to the community, they will come out and have jobs,” says Amy Holt, a Henderson County School Board member and strong advocate for the Spanish immersion program. “We’re going to have a group in our community that won’t struggle with anything when they get somebody that comes to them no matter where they are, if they’re in a restaurant or at Kimberly Clark, they’ll be able to translate. It’ll open a lot of doors for them.”

Going all in

Roots of the program go back at least five years when administrators began exploring the options.
“There are several models of dual-language programs around the country,” says Dr. Christine Smith, the school principal. “We decided, at first, to go with the 80 percent Spanish, 20 percent English model, at first in kindergarten and then work it up to the time when they’re in 5th grade, have it about 50/50.”
Administrators were leaning for a more balanced model.
“We read that more and more schools were doing immersion in kindergarten, and we visited schools in San Diego that were 100 percent immersion, and we came back and visited a school in Statesville, North Carolina, that was also 100 percent immersion in kindergarten and their kids were doing fine,” Smith says. “So, we did it. We went 100 percent immersion two years ago starting in kindergarten.”
The children that started the full immersion program are now in first grade, and teachers are seeing that they read and write better in both languages. They’re able to take the rules of reading they learn in Spanish and apply them to English. Teachers teach subjects like math and reading completely in Spanish, and do classroom activities also in Spanish. Students complete their assignments and take tests in English.
“We don’t teach for the test, we teach for these kids to learn that testing is necessary so that you can assess and see where these kids are at,” Holt says. “When we figure out the level that these kids are as opposed to the kids that aren’t being dually immersed, there’s a big difference. They’re a lot more proficient in the dual-language program.”

The first grade classroom of Elisa Carcaño is decorated with posters with vocabulary words, the Spanish alphabet, and rules of feminine and masculine adjectives. White children, black children and Hispanic children are all able to speak the same caliber of Spanish, and they have already learned things beyond the material high school students learn in foreign language classes.
While older children might be intimidated at plunging into a language they’re not speaking at home, 5-year-olds adapt easily.
“They don’t know it’s supposed to be hard,” Smith says. “They don’t know that it freaks us out. They just think if they can read the word ‘casa’ (Spanish for home) then they can apply the phonics and reading rules to reading anything in English. It’s been really amazing. Our third graders now, our oldest kids, are become more and more fluent in Spanish. They’re speaking to each other a lot more.”

‘Deeper thinking skills’

The differences in test scores between kids in the dual-language program compared to the kids in traditional educational classes are significant. Limited English Proficient native Spanish speakers and native English speakers in the dual-language program test higher in all subjects across the board. After going through a year of 100 percent Spanish immersion program in kindergarten, students were tested at the beginning of their first grade year. Dual-language native Spanish speakers kids tested at 25 percent and dual-language native English speakers kids tested at 67 percent. Non-dual language Spanish speakers tested at 8 percent while English-speaking kids at 38 percent.

The higher scores held true through the third grade. Kids in the dual language program do better than those that remained in traditional English-speaking classrooms.

“I knew this was big because we started at Bruce Drysdale and we have so many Spanish kids that go there,” Holt says. “I was thinking ‘Oh, it’s gonna help the Spanish speaking kids.’ I didn’t know it would help the English speaking kids. When they’re testing, they’re testing in English; they’re not getting Spanish tests to help them. They’re all taking the same exact test.”
Why is there such a big difference in test scores when comparing kids in the program with kids outside of it? It seems to relate to how the dual language approach activates the brain.
“It’s almost like the difference in learning what an apple is and then tasting an apple,” Holt says. “You’re getting it twice. You’re getting it in Spanish and learning how you comprehend something in Spanish and you’re also learning it in English. You’re seeing two sides of it, and it really helps them to understand it.”
Models predicted the advancement. But seeing it firsthand was something else.
“Kids in the dual-language classes are outperforming other kids in the non-dual-language classes in academics,” SMITH says. “The research said that would happen, and it has. The kids in dual-language class are developing deeper thinking skills; again the research said that would happen because it’s growing the brain dendrites more than monolingual folks. So your brain doesn’t expand, it develops neurotransmitters that weren’t there or that wouldn’t have ordinarily been there. These kids are really good thinkers generally compared to the non-dual-language folks.”
Once the program was under way, Smith recognized another factor. Native Spanish speakers were more natural dual-language teachers.
“We were originally teaching our kids like we, English-speaking Americans, learned to teach kids how to read,” she says. “Then I started hiring all these international teachers who taught children how to read with methods they learned in their native countries, well, it’s very different. A gal from Spain said, ‘That’s not how we teach reading,’ and so my international teachers have changed how we view not just language acquisition, but reading acquisition, how to learn to read in Spanish. They’ve kind of revolutionized our curriculum and the delivery of our curriculum; to put an emphasis on sentence structure and masculine and feminine, which we don’t have in English.”
In all, there are seven international teachers at Bruce Drysdale: two from Costa Rica, one from Columbia, one from Chile, one from Spain and two from Mexico.
“You should sit with them in a meeting, they all talk at once, and they say ‘Is that how you say that word in your country? We don’t even have that word in our country’ — because their dialects are different and their word choices are different. It’s funny because we had a group of kindergarten students a couple of years ago, and their teacher was a native Cuban. She’s lived in the United States since she was four, so her English doesn’t have an accent, but she has a distinct Spanish dialect. Then they went to first grade and had a teacher from Spain, so they started speaking with lisps.”
The native of Cuba was Ms. Rosello. Her mother was a pharmacist and her father was a successful oil distributor when the Castro revolution forced the family to flee to Miami in 1961 when Rosello was 4. “It was in January,” she says. “I remember they dressed me in a yellow and black plaid dress with velvet sleeves.”
In her class and in grades above, cultural barriers are breaking down.
“I suspected that was going to happen, we didn’t really plan for it, but it has happened, especially with the employment of all of these international teachers,” Smith says. “We try to put native-Spanish speakers in the classes as well. Research says we need about a 50/50 ratio of Spanish speakers to English speakers. We’ve not reached that goal yet. We’ve only got one third native Spanish speakers and two-thirds native English speakers. We want good models, kids who can speak Spanish, and so it’s worked out, it’s good enough.”
The dual-language has turned classrooms into a community that’s the same, not different.
“I see that they are less isolated and more blended,” Smith says. “They have friendships. They invite each other over to their houses. Heretofore, my Hispanic community has been a Hispanic community and we haven’t been mingling that much but in dual language classes, these kids have been having sleepovers, their parents talk, it’s broken down the boundaries with those families.”
Each year, the program has gained popularity.
“I always get nervous that no one will sign their children up for the dual-language kindergarten classes,” Smith said. That hasn’t been a problem.
Classes were added as more children’s parents applied them for the program. In its third year of operation, a waitlist formed.
“This year we registered 37 children in the dual language program,” Smith says, “and 19 of those were not Bruce Drysdale zoned. “Right now these kids, even though they’re just in the third grade, can take a CBM (curriculum-based measurement test) for Spanish 1 and probably pass it. When they leave fifth grade they will probably pass a CBM for Spanish 2. They’ll be going into middle school and they’ll already have high school credit.”

‘This has bridged a long existing gap’

At one point, about 15 years ago, the School Board considering turning over Bruce Drysdale to an experimental education organization called the Edison Project. After an uprising by teachers and parents, the board scrapped the plan. More recently, there was talk of merging Hendersonville and Bruce Drysdale elementary schools.
“This dual-language program was the result of people that were coming to the school board asking that we merge the two schools,” Holt says. “We didn’t think it was beneficial to either school to merge them. It wasn’t going to build a sense of community, it would have separated it.”
The dual-language program has given Bruce Drysdale something to boast about.
“Doing this program, I thought the technology would be a huge piece, and it is, but we don’t have people flocking to Bruce Drysdale because of the technology,” Holt says. “It’s really the dual-language program that’s done it and that’s where I’m going to put my daughter, Alyiah Faith. When you start them that young, kids are more open to it, they don’t put barriers up. This program has bridged a long existing gap. It has shown parents how important it is, especially in our community where there is a high population of native Spanish speakers, for children to not only learn two languages, but to also work together inside and outside of the classroom.”
(School administrators held a meeting on Tuesday at Hendersonville Middle School to talk about extending the dual-language program into middle school.)
The Spanish speakers from Bruce Drysdale will enroll in HMS in 2018. There has been conversation about expanding the dual-language track to other elementary schools
“My personal preference would be to duplicate this program in every elementary school,” Holt says. “There’s no bad that could come out of it, it’s nothing but good and these kids will be a lot more globally ready. They’ll be able to get more jobs; they’ll be able to understand more things even at the college level, because they have this proficient level of understanding things in two different languages. It’s had a big impact on Bruce Drysdale’s community.”