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When the new school year begins, kindergartners entering the Menlo Park City School District’s fledgling language immersion program will be divided between Laurel and Encinal schools.
The Spanish immersion program, which launched this school year with two kindergarten classes at Encinal, aims to make students bilingual and literate in both Spanish and English by fifth grade.
Superintendent Ken Ranella said that the constraints of campus construction and classroom space make it infeasible to house the entire program at Encinal.
At a well-attended meeting held Jan. 13, the Menlo Park school board voted unanimously to launch the program at Laurel with a single kindergarten class in the fall. Another Spanish immersion kindergarten class will be housed at the Encinal campus.
In a compromise, the entire current crop of kindergarteners will stay at Encinal through fifth grade and not be divided up. One of Mr. Ranella’s options would have sent half of those kindergarteners to Laurel next year, where they would remain for first through third grades.
Dividing the program between two campuses did not sit well with worried parents who crowded the board chambers and said the program has benefited from the extensive collaboration between its two kindergarten teachers. A bigger pool of students at a single campus will make it easier to balance class composition by gender and language skills, said two parents who spoke at the meeting.
“Now that it’s clear to us the educational value of having those two classes together, what can we do to preserve that?” asked parent John Osmer.
Mr. Ranella argued that teacher collaboration across a single grade is only one of several successful models for immersion. There will be plenty of opportunities for collaboration among immersion teachers of different grade levels at both schools, he said.
“I know various models work,” Mr. Ranella told board members. “I know because I’ve been in education for 32 years.”
Board members concurred with Mr. Ranella’s opinion that bilingual immersion students, who come from all three of the district’s elementary schools, should not displace children in regular classes attending their neighborhood schools. Devoting two out of each grade’s four classrooms at Encinal to bilingual immersion would likely cause involuntary transfers of students to other schools, Mr. Ranella said.
“Right now the construction has to take some role in this,” said board member Laura Rich. “We can’t deny the mess we are living in and the lack of space we have.”
Construction on Encinal’s new wing for grades 4-5 is behind schedule, adding to the space constraints.
It remains to be seen exactly how many new kindergarten students will enroll to start school in the fall, and how many will sign up for the 42 slots in the Spanish immersion program. District officials are expecting a continuation of the enrollment bubble that necessitated a record 17 kindergarten classrooms this year.
