The Encinal school campus appears set to be the home of a new Spanish immersion kindergarten class starting this fall, but that could change in a few years.
As part of a wide-ranging study session meeting held Jan. 9, the board of the Menlo Park City School District also considered a brand new possibility for the future of bilingual education: transplanting the immersion program into a bilingual magnet school at the O’Connor site in the Willows neighborhood.
“I think it would be an incredible thing to do, to create a magnet school,” said District Superintendent Ken Ranella.
Currently, the district leases the O’Connor school site to the private German-American School for about $300,000 a year, he said. If the fledgling Spanish immersion program takes off, in three or four years it might make sense to move the program to its own campus and create an alternative magnet school for the district, Mr. Ranella told the board. “It’s what most school districts (with bilingual programs) are doing,” he said.
Details about the curriculum and how the program will be run are still wide open, and the board will need to decide on basic guidelines, he said.
In the early grades, immersion classes are conducted primarily in the foreign language, and eventually increase the amount of English instruction time, Mr. Ranella said. The focus is on acquiring oral language skills, while the district’s current kindergarten curriculum focuses on written language skills, he said,
The 20-student kindergarten immersion class could be made up of half English speakers and half Spanish speakers, a smaller percentage of Spanish speakers, or be entirely English-speaking children. The Spanish-speaking children would likely be transfers from the Ravenswood District as part of the Tinsley program, Mr. Ranella said.
“I’m not prepared for immersion. It’s going to be a learning curve for me,” said Mr. Ranella as he briefed the board on a laundry list of long-term implications surrounding its decision to launch a Spanish immersion program. Kindergarten registration starts in February, and district officials don’t know how many parents will actually sign their children up for the Spanish immersion class, he said.
While they took no official action, in their comments the five board members agreed that Encinal, a grade 3-5 school, is the most sensible place for the new Spanish program. Encinal is launching its first kindergarten classes in the next school year as part of its three-year transition to a K-5 school, and it’s easier to hire a new bilingual teacher there than to displace an existing kindergarten teacher at Laurel or Oak Knoll schools, Mr. Ranella said.
A group of parents has been lobbying for bilingual education, and said that as much as 40 percent of incoming kindergarten families are interested in placing their kids in a Spanish immersion class.
Mr. Ranella recommended against beginning the immersion program so soon, saying that with the major school construction projects and redrawing of attendance boundary lines, the district had too much on its plate. However, a majority of school board members did not agree and voted 3-2 last month to start sooner, rather than later.
The next board meeting is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 15, at Encinal School.
