Amid praises of “good job” and star-shaped stickers, a student attending school in Gilroy may also receive a different kind of compliment: “excelente,” “muy bueno” or “terrifico.”
Last month, the Gilroy Unified School District won a Golden Bell award, given by the California School Boards Association to recognize innovative public school curriculum, for its dual-immersion program, teaching students in English and Spanish.
Now in its 15th year, the program uses a model in which students, from kindergarten through high school, learn their coursework in both languages.
“The program was expanded because of the belief in having an additive language approach,” said Sylvia Reyes, principal of Las Animas Elementary School. “Parents really saw a lot of value with this.”
Reyes is one of the founders of GUSD’s dual-immersion program. In 1999, just before the closure of San Ysidro Elementary School where Reyes served as principal, she and other teachers began looking at dual-immersion programs across the country with the thought that the model may one day fit into GUSD’s curriculum.
When San Ysidro closed in 2000, the program started at the district’s new elementary school, Las Animas. Later, South Valley Middle School and Gilroy High School began their own dual-immersion programs to meet the needs of students in the first Las Animas dual-immersion class as they grew older.
“We begin with them and we see them go through fifth, then through eighth and through high school,” said Las Animas first grade teacher Araceli Ramos. “It’s the same program, the same kids, so we become very close. It becomes like an extended family.
“In [one] class I have 14 siblings of my other students from before. So I already know mom and dad by the time we come to conferences.”
At Las Animas, some teachers are paired together, with one teaching in English and the other in Spanish, while other teachers switch between languages during lessons. Teachers in the dual-immersion program employ various methods to make material more accessible.
“I use songs and poems,” said Las Animas second grade teacher Beti Carrillo. “One song is “La Tia Monica,” to teach body parts and movement. I use grammar songs to teach verbs, verb tenses, irregular verbs and adjectives.”
Enrollment in the district’s dual-immersion program is substantial. Across Las Animas, Rod Kelley Elementary School, South Valley Middle School and Gilroy High School, more than 1,000 students are in the program.
South Valley began dual-immersion classes in 2006. Some teachers from Las Animas followed the program to teach at South Valley, partly in order to keep with the inaugural class that began at Las Animas.
“In some monolingual classes, [a student’s] intelligence isn’t given a forum to be shared,” South Valley eighth grade teacher Maritza Salcido said. “So here in these classes, there is interdependence … and kids respect each other a lot more.”
GUSD recommends enrolling students in the dual-immersion program as early as possible. Most students enroll in kindergarten and first grade, and so by middle school or high school, students have essentially grown up together.
“I think because there are mixed cultures in our program it brings everyone together,” South Valley eighth-grader Allison Duross said.
“I think it breaks the stereotype. It is okay to know multiple languages but you’re not different if you just know Spanish or just know English.”
“You’ve been with these people since you were really small so you make a lot of good friendships and you can trust them,” South Valley eighth-grader Geovani Velasco said. “We ask each other for help sometimes.”
One of the challenges dual-immersion students face is reading texts in Spanish. The district selects textbooks and novels that have been adapted, rather than simply translated, for Spanish reading. A lot of the books checked out from South Valley’s library are simply American literature in Spanish.
“A lot of the kids like to read the ones that are out in movies,” South Valley librarian Lisa Navarette said.
Captain Underpants, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Fault in Our Stars and even the Harry Potter series are among the most popular Spanish books checked out from the school’s library.
Duross and Velasco anticipate enrolling in Gilroy High School’s Biomedical Science Academy—for students interested in a career in science, technology, engineering or math—which includes dual-immersion classes.
Gilroy High began its dual-immersion classes in 2010. Currently, GUSD is one of just a handful of districts in the state to have a K-12 dual-immersion program. However, Gilroy High has fewer students in the program, compared with the district’s elementary and middle schools, and the GHS program has only three teachers. When it first came to Gilroy High there were virtually no dual-immersion classes.
“The DI program definitely needed an overhaul, so we developed a pathway for DI, for what the course sequence would be like from ninth grade to 12th grade,” Gilroy High principal Marco Sanchez said.
Other classes in the program at GHS include biology and global studies. Finding material in these subjects is more of a challenge as the coursework grows more rigorous.
“Getting the materials for biology and for history was difficult. We had to shop around the world to find those textbooks,” Sanchez said. “We had some very resourceful teachers—they found some textbooks in South America that met our needs.”
“There’s tons of DI stuff for primary grades, and as you get up in the junior high grades it’s a lot less, and as you get into the high school grades, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Gilroy High teacher Susan Freiberg said.
Freiberg, who teaches Spanish and history, has been in the GHS dual-immersion program from the beginning. Teachers like her, with college degrees in both Spanish and another academic discipline, are difficult to find. Expansion of the dual-immersion program in the district partly depends on finding teachers to meet a growing demand.
“Our city is growing dramatically, and that’s a pretty unique position to be in, in this county,” GUSD Superintendent Deborah Flores said. “Families are choosing to live in Gilroy for many reasons and I believe one of those reasons is what they hear about our schools.”
Flores was previously a superintendent in the Lucia Mar Unified School District in San Luis Obispo County, at which time a charter school in the district implemented its own dual-immersion program, which ultimately proved unsuccessful.
When Flores came to GUSD, she had reservations about the district’s dual-immersion program but became convinced of its success after seeing the results. GUSD reports that students in the program do better on standardized tests in English and Spanish than their peers outside of the program. High schools students can exempt themselves from foreign language prerequisites when applying to college. And, of course, students graduate from the program with the ability to speak the second most popular language in the country.
“I am its best cheerleader and strongest supporter now because it really works,” Flores said. “My only regret is: I wish I’d have moved here earlier, so my son could have been in the program.”
