English as a New Language

Stephanie Margetts, executive director of Holy Rosary Regional School/Juan Diego Academy (HRRS/JDA) in Tacoma, Wash., says she has seen the future—and heard it, too. She is leading an educational innovation called two-way immersion, or dual-language instruction that is transforming this Catholic school with a previously shrinking enrollment.

“Now, you walk in and you feel the energy of a bicultural school that celebrates the English and Spanish languages equally,” Margetts said. Enrollment, spanning pre-K for three-year-olds through eighth grade, increased 28 percent last year to 191 currently.

The student body is roughly half English-dominant, half Spanish-dominant. Pre-schoolers, regardless of their dominant tongue, spend their whole day speaking 100% Spanish; kindergarteners follow a 90% Spanish and 10% English model; and as of 2015, grades 1-3 maintain a 50-50 schedule, rotating one day totally in Spanish with the next immersed in English. Over several years, the approach will climb age levels, up through grade 8.

“We’ve created a model that people want,” Margetts said. Reaching out to a working class region of the state where diverse families share high aspirations for their children, “the model allows us to serve, to bring cultures together. That’s an exciting part of what we’ve been doing.”

A combination of incremental changes has kept every day exciting for students. In 2010, Holy Rosary’s enrollment had declined to 101; the Fulcrum Foundation, providing financial support to students in the Seattle Archdiocese, consulted with the foundation’s diversity committee to establish the first ever two-way immersion program in the archdiocese. The school continues to seek teachers with subject-area knowledge who are bilingual.

Experienced mentors have come together to help make the investment in HRRS/JDA bear fruit. A bilingual, bicultural teacher already on their staff became the leader of this mission—building a Catholic school whose curriculum is fully aligned with the changing demographics of the Catholic Church.  An estimated 35-40% of Catholics in the U.S. today are Latino.

In 2011, HRRA/JDA joined the Two-Way Immersion Network for Catholic Schools (TWIN-CS) initiative at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education. Dr. Tim Uhl, now superintendent of schools for the Diocese of Helena, led Holy Rosary’s transition as its principal. Dr. Bridget Yaden has worked closely with the school as a board member and as chair of a local university’s Hispanic studies department.

Margetts arrived at HRRS/JDA for 2014-2015 from Sacred Heart School in Washington, D.C. Sacred Heart adopted dual-language instruction 16 years ago. Along with Escuela Guadalupe in Denver, Sacred Heart was one of the first Catholic schools in the United States to implement two-way immersion. For the past three years, TWIN-CS has supported other schools adopting this model (close to 20 in total).

Elise Heil, who leads Sacred Heart as its principal today, said the school’s enrollment has held steady around 200 students, with the two-way immersion model consistently appealing to many parents from various backgrounds, some of whom can utilize the District’s school voucher program.

This model helps schools garner interest from parents because they see it boosting academic rigor and student readiness for a diverse culture. English language-dominant families see fluency in Spanish preparing their children for a multilingual society, Heil said, adding that numerous Spanish language-dominant parents appreciate the life-skills development as well as the school’s Catholic identity. Schools have become more intentional in how to engage all families in embracing diversity.

Heill noted that immersion fosters solidarity because “everybody is a language learner.” But this two-way approach is not easily replicable among all schools, she said.

“This is still a very new model,” although the diverse, competitive D.C. education marketplace has prompted more ventures into multiple-language immersion. The model is familiar in many public schools around the country, but it is generating insights as more schools implement it.

“The younger you start, the better,” Heil said, recommending that a school initiate the approach among three- and four-year-old preschoolers, then add grades incrementally over a period of years.

Sacred Heart is sharing its expertise with some of the newcomers. Heil said every school experiences challenges, including her own. Non-bilingual applicants cannot be accepted beyond second grade. No Catholic high schools in the area replicate the approach, so no long-term K-through-12 continuity exists. The model’s major sectors of growing student enrollment are in the pre-K classes.

Luis Ricardo Fraga, Ph.D., who helped start HRRS/JDA in Tacoma as a board member with the Fulcrum Foundation, continues to study the approach closely among his research topics as the Arthur Foundation Endowed Professor of Transformative Latino Leadership at the University of Notre Dame. As a political scientist and fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives, he has written about Holy Rosary’s transition.

“Two-way immersion in Catholic schools can be an effective mechanism for building intercultural communities that capture the richness of diverse communities,” he said. “As the Catholic Church in the United States becomes more and more multicultural, two-way immersion values both English and Spanish languages and cultures in ways fully consistent with recent statements of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.”

Fraga and other scholars have noted that the approach is well-suited to Catholic values—a respect for the dignity of distinct cultures, the notion of a “common good” to be pursued by all, and a special care for those on society’s margins.

Although the resources available for language education models will differ among schools, the stewardship of those resources takes place in a strong family context, as Heil pointed out.

“We’re kind of a home for many immigrant families, and the Catholic piece is something that brings us all together,” she said of Sacred Heart School. “We have a shared mission and a shared goal. Becoming a bilingual school really benefits the entire population.”

Celebrating Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, in Catholic school classrooms in the United States is a magnificent way to encourage students to pray for and honor deceased family and friends. It also provides an opportunity for Mexican and Central American-origin students to witness their school community learning from the beauty and richness of their own cultural heritage. Observing Día de los Muertos in school doesn’t just help students celebrate their culture, it helps them sustain it.

Like Halloween, Día de los Muertos is a holiday linked to the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls in the Catholic liturgical calendar. But, unlike Halloween, which is largely about candy and parties, Día de los Muertos is a family-centered holiday that celebrates the lives of loved ones who have died and the generations of ancestors who have gone before us. From family picnics at grave sites to lavishly decorated home altars to the aroma of marigolds and pan de muerto, the celebration of Día de los Muertos is as beautiful as it is profound. The following resources and lessons will help children young and old learn about this magnificent holiday.

Videos

• Food for the Ancestors is a 60-minute DVD produced by PBS that explains Day of the Dead through food, art and celebration. It takes viewers to the streets, homes, bakeries, cemeteries and churches of Puebla, Mexico, and presents one of the most colorful, in-depth portraits of the holiday. Order this DVD from PBS for teachers to watch and integrate into their lessons.

• Discover Day of the Dead is a 5-minute video from The Discovery Channel that shows a quick glimpse of how Day of the Dead is observed in Patzcuaro, Mexico.

• The PBS cartoon characters, Maya and Miguel, explain the holiday to young viewers in a 22-minute episode. Here’s a two-minute snippet of the program in which Maya’s abuelita explains why the beautifully decorated calavera (skull) is so important to her.

Reading Materials

• Scholastic has put together a wonderful list of children’s books that address Día de los Muertos.

• The November 2010 edition of Scholastic News magazine focuses exclusively on Día de los Muertos. You can find digital downloads of the magazine here.

• This article by the Smithsonian Institution is an excellent non-fiction text for older students (grades 5-12) and explains how the holiday is a melding of indigenous and Catholic traditions.

• "All Saint’s Day All Night" is beautiful story from Highlights for Kids magazine (November 2010 issue) that shows how a similar holiday is celebrated in Poland!  It provides another great opportunity to spotlight how different cultures celebrate the Feast of All Saints and All Souls.

Art and Activities

• Create ofrendas: Have students make alters to celebrate loved ones who are deceased. This lesson plan from the University of North Carolina excellent ideas. Extensions of this activity include:
  • History: Create an ofrenda for historical figures.
  • Language Arts: Create an ofrenda for characters in a novel.
  • Religion: Create an ofrenda for a saint or decorate an altar in the church or cemetery on the school's property.

• Decorate calaveras: Ornate sugar skulls are one of the most important images connected with the celebration of Día de los Muertos. Here are a few simple ways to integrate them into lessons:
  • Calaveras Shapes Lesson (K-2) from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
  • Calavera Coloring Pages

• Compare and Contrast Halloween and Day of the Dead:
  • This side-by-side comparison from the blog Con Mi Madre is a great resource.
  • A good Venn diagram activity is included in this lesson pack.

• This Day of the Dead Educational Activity Guide is a wonderful collection of readings and activities (includes a step-by-step lesson on papel picado) produced by the Museum of Mexic-Arte in Austin, Texas. It takes a very cross-cultural perspective and provides multiple ideas for art activities.

Want to learn more about culturally sustaining pedagogy? Apply to the ENL Program today.

Photos by Nathan Solis, courtesy of the Eastsider LA.
Originally appeared in Students learn about love, death & Dia de los Muertos at an East L.A. cemetery, October 30, 2014.

You might say early-childhood teacher Courtney O’Grady, with help from her students aged three and four, as well as their parents, is writing the book on pre-kindergarten classes as a growing force in Catholic schools.

“One of my favorite annual projects is to make a book—with help from the children’s families—called Future Saints, Class of xxxx, whatever year they will graduate,” said O’Grady, who teaches pre-school at the Cathedral of St. Raymond Catholic School in Joliet, IL.

“We talk about how the kids can all be friends to Jesus and maybe become saints one day. Our book incorporates pictures of each child as a baby, with the story behind the name they were given and also a current picture.”

Each student gets a turn to take the book home. “I love involving families with projects like this because I also feel a responsibility to help parents feel included, welcomed, and valued,” O’Grady said in a recent interview. “I think we need to partner with families so they feel motivated to participate in their child’s faith formation.”

This is not your typical pre-K class or “day care” experience. But pre-K offerings have multiplied in Catholic schools around the country. One University of Notre Dame scholar’s report, completed in 2013, concluded that “early-childhood programming is already a key component of the Catholic educational enterprise,” with pre-school enrollment in 11 (arch)dioceses studied having risen 20 percent over five years.*

Data from the National Catholic Educational Association show that 11.3 percent of total enrollments in Catholic elementary schools (through grade 8) were in pre-school classes as of 2014-2015, up from 8.4 percent ten years earlier.

The trend is not gigantic, but noteworthy initiatives are helping to drive the numbers, according to educators. One is the faith-based element of “new evangelization” Catholic schools are extending to children of a younger age—and, importantly, to their parents—when they set up pre-school programs.

Another factor is the fit some Catholic schools have found as they pursue dual goals—pre-school growth and an increase in Latino enrollment—at the same time.  

“The best way to make sure you have robust enrollments is to create opportunities for more families to come,” said Patrick Patterson, principal of Roanoke Catholic School in Virginia, where a class for 4-year-olds was recently revived to complement the kindergarten-through-high school curriculum.

Patterson resumed pre-K4 this year, seeing an opportunity that earlier budgeting models had missed. Technically, pre-school classes for kids age 3 and 4 had failed to pay for themselves, although a small “pre-K3” class, formed earlier to meet parents’ needs, has continued.

A new factor has emerged. The Diocese of Richmond has ramped up its Segura Initiative, which promotes Latino enrollments in diocesan schools. English language learners are the fastest growing population in U.S. schools, creating both challenges and opportunities.

One key to the initiative in Richmond is grassroots recruitment conducted by members of the Latino community called Segura Advocates. The idea parallels the “madrinas” model of outreach from the Catholic School Advantage Campaign and the Latino Enrollment Initiative, both led by Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE).

As more Latino families have learned about the quality and affordability of Catholic schools, enrollments have increased. Roanoke Catholic recommitted to both “pre-K4” and “pre-K3” classes when the number of prospective students attracted by the Segura program jumped by 50 percent, Patterson said.

“What we’re finding, as parents start to look at moving their kids from a public school to a Catholic school, you’re not looking at a single student from each Latino family, but rather 3, 4, or 5 kids,” because the extended family doesn’t want to divide its children between different schools.

Roanoke wants to help keep the families together, and it can innovate—with tuition structures, the tapping of community resources available to kids in all schools, and versatile scheduling of its teachers, specialists and aides, for example—to ease the budgetary challenges for all concerned, too.

“It’s a really exciting time,” Patterson said. Besides meeting working families’ needs and building community engagement, more students in all the grades are benefiting from what sociologists have called the Catholic School advantage—a boon for disadvantaged students overcoming academic achievement gaps. More access to pre-kindergarten courses, taught by educators trained in early-childhood, special education, and English as a New Language skills, can spark cognitive growth earlier.

Joana Camacho, principal of Sacred Heart School in Oklahoma City, sees a big difference between students who enter in her school’s pre-K4 class and those who start in kindergarten. “It’s like night and day in their readiness for learning,” she said.

O’Grady, who studies English as a New Language teaching through ACE, added there’s a literacy advantage. “In early childhood, we are in a position to truly support English language learners, or dual language learners.” Early literacy gains in one language improve second-language literacy, broadening improvements in learning through future grades.

A school’s increases in both Latino enrollment and pre-K enrollment benefits everyone, Patterson said. Students with non-Latino backgrounds gain valuable exposure to global cultures, languages, and perspectives.

Camacho, the Oklahoma City principal who participates in Notre Dame’s Latino Enrollment Initiative, added that her school extends its teaching vocation to Latino families in its inner-city neighborhood. A “parent university,” held on Saturdays, offers instruction on such topics as Internet safety, how to enrich kids’ study skills, and nutrition and wellness. “Everybody is learning,” Camacho said.

Patterson added he has seen parents attracted to join the Catholic Church through their children’s experiences. “Your parents are more engaged when you get kids involved at a younger age.”

St. Raymond’s has drawn Joliet families closer to the Church simply because they “felt so welcomed and supported by our school and community,” O’Grady agreed.

The power of community is the ultimate differentiation from typical day care centers and public pre-schools. Non-Catholic alternatives have proliferated around Roanoke, according to Patterson, but only the school he leads can claim 126 years of engagement and experience. The attention to learning and growing that begins in pre-K3 and pre-K4 “is not a new recipe for us.”   

There’s also a taste of O’Grady’s Saints book in the Catholic school mix. “You’ve got God’s presence every day, and you’re able to talk about that,” Patterson said. “We’re able to weave in some of the morals and ethics pieces that cannot be discussed in the public sector, even in pre-K.” 

_ _ _ _

*Prof. James Frabutt, on the faculty of ACE’s Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program, published a report in Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice in 2013. The study, “Reaching the Youngest Hearts and Minds: Interviews with Diocesan Leaders Regarding Catholic Early Childhood Education,” concluded that “early childhood programming must be considered a strategically significant component of the Catholic educational enterprise.” Dioceses see Catholic schools evangelizing whole families, Frabutt reported. “There was a sense that helping these young hearts and minds grow in the Catholic faith was a particularly life-giving ministry, but one that also reaches deeply into parental faith development and catechesis.”

When Lynne Mullen, Principal of St. Leander School in the Diocese of Oakland, received the invitation to attend the Latino Enrollment Institute (LEI) in 2012, she saw it as the perfect opportunity to respond to her parish community's changing demographics. Having observed the growing number of Latino families at the Spanish Masses and in the parish religious education programs, she was eager to reach out to this growing population and make Catholic education a more visible and viable option for Latino families in the community.

The LEI provided just the tools she needed to begin this important outreach. After implementing a number of strategies learned at the LEI, including meeting with prospective families after the Spanish Masses, promoting the school from the pulpit, personally walking families through the enrollment process and its accompanying paperwork, and making all scholarship applications and information available in Spanish, Mullen and her staff were able to increase the Latino enrollment at St. Leander by 43 percent the following year.

Mullen returned to Notre Dame the summer after attending the LEI to further develop St. Leander's capacity to serve the growing number of Latino families at the school, particularly those whose primary language is not English. She participated in the English as a New Language Program (ENL), where she learned how to support the academic, linguistic, and cultural needs of the Latino students and families in her school. "I have learned strategic ways to help our parents connect more meaningfully to our school and support their children's education," Mullen said. "The information I learned in my classes has helped our faculty more effectively design curriculum to assess and instruct our language learners. Our partnership with the University of Notre Dame has truly been an integral part of our Latino Enrollment Plan."

When Corinne Viglietta (pictured here, third from left) graduated from Notre Dame, she had no idea she would one day be a high school teacher, let alone call herself part of the ACE and Cristo Rey families.

After studying literature in graduate school, she went on to teach English in France. Upon returning to the United States, she landed at an innovative Catholic high school, Don Bosco Cristo Rey in Washington, D.C. Her school is founded on the Cristo Rey model, which gives low-income students the chance to work in corporate jobs to finance their college-prep tuition.

Accustomed to working with college students, Corinne found teaching high school juniors—many of whom were English language learners—an enormous challenge. She explains, "I knew I needed a stronger background in linguistics and more classroom strategies, but I didn't know where to look. I was an English nerd. I had never taken an education class in my life."

Corinne learned about ACE's English as a New Language (ENL) program, which trains teachers to educate linguistically diverse student populations, and decided to apply. The ENL program helped Corinne teach challenging works by Shakespeare and Woolf to non-native readers and build a repertoire of developmentally appropriate strategies for teaching academic writing.

Through ENL, Corinne also learned to strengthen community partnerships, especially those with universities, museums, and student families. Recently, she even started a student-staffed writing center at her school, where most of the peer tutors are English language learners. "It's a friendly, supportive space for young writers," she says. "Students run the show. Differences are celebrated. Everyone's welcome."

The ENL program introduced her to the vibrancy of ACE's mission and shaped the way she taught all of her students, not just those who spoke another language at home. It also opened many doors for her professionally. After completing the program in 2011, Corinne has returned to Notre Dame for the past two summers to help coordinate the summer component of ENL. She also assists a former ENL professor with her online course.

"ENL has nurtured my vocation as a teacher," Corinne says. "I'm so grateful to ENL and to ACE for helping me develop my passion for language and literature and reminding me of my call to support the most vulnerable among us."