This November, Orange County voters have the opportunity to support a bond that will address ongoing capital needs in the Orange County and Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) districts. Our vote to approve this School Bond is essential for improving the learning environment for thousands of students in our community. CHCCS’s proposals not only include facilities improvements at the highest-need schools but also related actions to address elementary school under-enrollment and improve the District’s Spanish/English Dual Language (DL) program. Improving the DL program while addressing other operational and enrollment challenges is a progressive step that community members should support.
As we consider the District’s proposals, it is important to understand the history and value of the DL program. The Spanish DL program was founded in 2002 to raise achievement among Spanish-speaking Multilingual Learners through core academic instruction in both Spanish and English. It promotes biliteracy, bilingualism and cross-cultural understanding for all DL students, and English language acquisition for Multilingual Learners. The program has grown into a full magnet school at FPG Bilingüe and a magnet strand at Carrboro Elementary and serves many of our community’s children who depend on public schools for English and academic learning, among other services.
Demand for the DL program is high among both native Spanish- and English-speaking families, even during a time when District elementary enrollment is falling. This is because bilingual education encompasses best practices for all students. It is designed around Multilingual Learners but benefits any child because:
- Bilingual education leads to higher educational outcomes for all students, including Multilingual Learners and students of color from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Bilingual education promotes diversity through understanding of various cultures, backgrounds, and language profiles. Students feel validated about their own identities and are more accepting of others.
- Bilingual education can enhance learning for students with special needs, and multilingualism does not negatively impact students with neurodevelopmental disorders. Bilingual education is especially impactful for Latino Multilingual Learner students with special needs, who gain language and literacy skills in Spanish in addition to English.
- Bilingual education creates stronger communities by creating multicultural environments that promote positive risk-taking, open-mindedness, and tolerance in students and families through exposure to wider-varieties of world views. It elevates the status of the Spanish language and instills in our community the value for ALL students in becoming bilingual and multicultural.
It is time for CHCCS’s DL program to grow and improve again. Plans to do so were proposed in the 2012 CHCCS DL Program report as the next step after founding a full magnet school at FPG. The committee at the time thought this could happen 4-6 years from then, but now, 15 years later, we are finally considering next steps.
Change can be difficult to envision and accept, but we have to embrace it to progress as a District. Our community has already navigated the difficulty of change when CHCCS first expanded the Spanish Dual Language program in 2012 to consolidate the Scroggs and FPG strands into one magnet school at FPG while reassigning the non-DL FPG students to other elementary schools. At that time, there was vocal opposition from some community members who disagreed with the proposal. They wrote letters to the editor, petitions, and public comment citing the importance of preserving FPG as a neighborhood school. However, support for FPG as a DL magnet school was wider because it improved access and educational services to many of our community’s children who rely on high-quality public schools for academic opportunities. Now that school, FPG Bilingüe, is a very successful educational program that enjoys widespread community support.
While we review the District’s proposals for how to use the School Bond funding, considerations such as transportation and student reassignment are important, but they should not be weighed against whether we plan for improvements of our District’s unique DL program. The DL program and its future embody our District’s core values of social justice and collective efficacy by investing in and improving student outcomes through equity-centered programming. DL program improvements should be prominent in each of the District’s proposals. We as a community ultimately should support a plan that addresses capital needs while continuing to build our DL program in a way that maximizes modes of transportation and serves diverse student communities.
Moving forward, we implore the community to vote for the School Bond this November. Multiple schools, including those with DL programs, are in dire need of attention due to aging and unsafe buildings. We also ask that the community support the purpose and potential of our DL program so that we can continue building on the foundation established by community leaders more than two decades ago. Finally we ask that the District’s decision-making process prioritize Dual Language program improvements and that school-based DL representatives be included in the planning committee. We look forward to how we can progress as a community through strengthening our public school system, with an eye on social justice and collective efficacy to build a stronger, more vibrant community, just as our students are learning to do in our classrooms.
Jenna Nielsen, who works in dual language at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School, contributed to this piece. Views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of their employer or any organizational affiliations.