Daisy, a small Latino girl with glossy hair and dark eyes meant for taking in the world, conversed in Spanish with her classmates while creating Play-Doh masterpieces in Pascale Hardy's three- to five-year-olds' evening Head Start class. \nMoments later, she effortlessly switched to English as she spoke with the class aide. "What's your name?" Daisy asked.\n"Megan," said the aide.\n"I have a friend named Megan," Daisy said, with a huge smile on her face. She promptly turned back to the Spanish conversation that was going on around her.\n"Some of these kids are very bilingual," Hardy said. "They have a window of opportunity between the ages of three and six because it is very easy for them to learn English at that age."\nSince the recent influx of Latino children into the Bloomington area, the Monroe County Community School Corporation has attempted to take advantage of that window of opportunity.\n
Cooperation from the corporation
\nFive of the school corporation's elementary schools -- Templeton, Binford, University, Childs and Rogers, as well as three middle schools and two high schools, offer English as a Second Language programs.\nGracia Valiant, co-director of the Templeton-Shalom Family Resource Center, said ESL students used to attend only University Elementary because of their parents' relationship to IU. But as the population of internationals in Bloomington increased, University Elementary was overwhelmed by the number of ESL children it was trying to serve, she said.\nSince then, Templeton Elementary has become the magnet school for ESL students, with an enrollment of 26 Latino students for their 2005-2006 school year.\n"If a child goes to a school without an ESL program, they are given the opportunity to go to Templeton and are provided with transportation," said \nMCCSC ESL Coordinator Martha Rodgers. "All children are given the right to receive services."\nRodgers' own position at the school corporation is one of the new solutions responding to the growing number of ESL students in Monroe County. Until last year, the school corporation employed a Director of Multicultural Education who headed the ESL programs.\nWhen the director resigned for personal reasons, Rogers said it became clear that there were now too many responsibilities for one director to handle. While Rogers is in charge of the ESL programs, related areas have been delegated to other employees.\n"There isn't a director, but this way we don't have anyone stretched too thin, and we can focus on our students more effectively," Rodgers said.\nAs part of the ESL programs, teachers work with Latino children during school hours. If the students are new to the school, the ESL teachers work with them in small groups until they feel comfortable. After the children are more established, the ESL teachers come into their classrooms and help them with the curriculum. \nMCCSC also employs interpreters for school events like parent-teacher conferences and translates important documents such as enrollment forms into Spanish.\n
Encouraging family involvement
\nIn addition to the efforts of MCCSC, Valiant is also attempting to ease the transition for Latino students through her work. While the Family Resource Center offers assistance to all families, Valiant and her co-director Nancy Armstrong both speak Spanish and frequently assist Latinos.\n"We are trying to involve families more in what is going on in the school building and are trying to provide them with opportunities to find out how things work," Valiant said. "The purpose of the program is to give them English so that they can interact."\nThe Templeton-Shalom Family Resource Center holds an evening family literacy program that is funded by Head Start and by the MCCSC. While the parents learn English and family literacy skills, Latino children like Daisy have their own classes. \nValiant said keeping children in their own roles is sometimes a challenge for Latino families.\n"It's problematic because children become interpreters for their families, which is not a good thing," she said. "Our goal is to not have the child in the adult's role because it shifts the balance of the family."\nBradley Levinson, an associate professor of education at IU, also said that parental involvement has been an issue for some Latinos, but that schools are often responsible for the problem.\n"It is related more to class because it is harder for poor folks who are working double shifts to be involved in the way that middle class parents are involved," Levinson said. "The school needs to think outside of the box. Latino parents are involved, it just doesn't take the form that schools say it should."\nValiant said that in Monroe County, schools have had the best response to the increasing Latino population.\n"The community is a little slow in examining this issue and doing something about it," Valiant said. "The school district has stepped up to the plate faster than anyone else in the community, which is often very difficult because it is so strapped for money. There are things that could be better, but it's probably better than in most places."\nLevinson said that although Latino children may face other challenges like developing peer relationships with English-speaking classmates, or mastering a curriculum in a different language, legal status should never be a concern for them.\n"It's a long-standing tradition in U.S. public education that a child only needs to demonstrate residence to go to school," Levinson said. "A school district has a certain responsibility to actually be proactive in trying to get children to enroll if they know of them in the area."\nRodgers agreed that children's education should be more important than their legal status.\n"Legal status is not our concern, our concern is that there are children and we need to educate them," she said. "We are not looking to see if they are illegal, our priority is to give them an education"
