Borderzine (https://borderzine.com/tag/elementary-education/)
Spending two hours at the school to see the challenges faced by rural schools in Mexico opened my eyes to reflect on my own teaching experience. What I saw was that education as the great equalizer is often unequal in the resources available to a school, but poor schools often equal equal academic success.
EL PASO, Texas — As El Paso continues to grow in population, so does the dual culture and bilingual language of the region. Because the U.S. is quickly becoming a bilingual country, many El Pasoans now realize the importance of teaching their children both English and Spanish, regardless of their ethnicity. Lundy Elementary School was one of seven new schools that started the implementation of the Dual Language Program this past 2009-2010 scholarly year. Even in that short amount of time, the program has blossomed, attracting parents and their children from both the Spanish dominant and English dominant speaking spectrums.
“In my school, and most of the schools in the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD), we have two different classes, one is English, and the other one is in Spanish,” said Ina Lachmann, principal of Lundy Elementary. “We populate it with half of the children who have a dominant language in Spanish, and the other half who have a dominant language in English.”
By putting both groups of children together, they learn to read, write, and speak 50 percent of the time in both languages through the Dual Language Program.