This story begins: Daily Yonder.
In rural America, non-native English speakers are less likely to receive adequate support in school than their urban peers and may experience lower educational achievement over the course of their lives, but some rural schools are developing multilingual education strategies that rival those in urban and suburban school districts.
Larger schools generally have an easier time raising funds to offer a wider variety of courses: from advanced U.S. history courses to Spanish immersion. More students mean more money. But in rural Dubois County, Indiana, administrators are prioritizing English-learner education, where students have access to the “gold standard” multilingual program, a hard-won achievement for any U.S. school, especially for such a small district.
“We are the only school in the area that has started a dual language program,” Rossina Sandoval, director of community engagement for Southwest Dubois County School District, told The Daily Yonder in an interview.
To meet the highest standards, students in the dual language immersion program receive 50 percent English classes and 50 percent Spanish classes. Fifty percent of the program is made up of students whose first language is Spanish, and the other half are made up of students whose first language is English. The program is currently offered in kindergarten through third grade, with plans to expand to fourth and fifth grades.
Developing a program of 50/50 language instruction and 50/50 student enrollment allows students to not only learn both their native and target languages from their teachers, but also learn from each other, Sandoval said.
“It has proven to be the most effective way to develop language skills,” she said.
When the program was first introduced, schools faced pushback from both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking families: Spanish-speaking families felt that schools should prioritize English learning because their children already spoke Spanish at home, while English-speaking families worried that they wouldn’t be able to help their children with their Spanish homework.
To address the concerns of both families, the school shared information about the benefits of a formal bilingual education. Spanish-speaking students receive grammar, spelling, reading and writing instruction in their native language, in addition to maintaining their conversational skills. This approach also helps students who already speak another language learn to read and write in the other language.
Learning two languages does not impair one’s ability to master either language. Bilingual children display According to Sandoval, they will have better focus, better logical thinking and be able to adapt to a wider range of opportunities in the workforce.
“That makes sense. We want the best for our kids,” she said. “The best thing we can do is educate the whole community that this is the best way to develop multilingualism, the best way to develop global skills and develop global citizens.”
Intersecting Issues
Dubois County’s Latino population has been growing for decades. Today, it’s 9.5 percent, about half the national average. But in schools in southwest Dubois County, more than one-third of students identify as Latino. (The difference reflects the higher birth rate among the Latino population and the uneven distribution of Latino families in the county.)
The demographics of rural schools across the country are changing. Recent studies show: Report According to the National Rural Education Association, rural districts enrolled 80,000 more English learners and multilingual speakers in the 2021 school year than in 2013.
Historically, local school districts have struggled to provide a quality education to non-native English speakers, and small populations of English learners make it difficult to fund robust bilingual programs, often overlooking the need.
Rural English language learners are at the intersection of overlapping structural issues in public education. Nationwide teacher shortage The situation is even worse in non-urban areas, especially in racially diverse, high-poverty rural schools. Nationwide, there is a shortage of bilingual educators, or educators qualified to teach English as a second language (ESL).
According to Recent ResearchWhile rural English learner populations are growing, rural multilingual learners are less likely to receive instruction in their native language, and while federal guidelines require all non-native English speakers to receive specialized instruction, only just over 60 percent of rural students receive it.
Sandoval said Dubois County’s top-notch bilingual education program should be adopted as a model by other rural school districts. “As an immigrant and as a U.S. citizen, I’m very proud because this can be replicated in communities like ours,” he said.
Sandoval said support for such programs must be built both inside and outside of school buildings. “There has to be a certain tolerance for bilingualism and multilingualism. This is not just an effort on my part, it’s an effort for the school and the community.”
Programs to foster interaction and trust with parents include “Cafe en el Parque,” a monthly parent-teacher meeting in Spanish attended by more than 100 families, and “Emergent Bilingual,” an after-school and weekend program where new immigrant students and their families learn about how the American education system works.
Programs that help build community support and engagement include “Fuertes Together,” a partnership with the public library where families hear stories in Spanish and English and are exposed to cultural music, dance and art, and a new program, “Bilingual Village,” which helps bilingual students find conversation partners in the community with whom they can converse in their new language.
A broad strategy
As a child in the 1990s, Esmeralda Cruz and her family moved from Mexico to rural Clinton County, Indiana, where she still lives and works today. “At the time, there weren’t many Latino families in the area, and in my first-grade class, I only had one classmate who was bilingual,” she says. This posed significant challenges for her education. Instead of receiving proper language instruction, Esmeralda says she was placed in classes designed to address her learning disabilities.
Cruz’s experience is not unusual, according to Maria Cody, a multilingual education professor at North Carolina State University. In communities unfamiliar with serving immigrant populations, she has seen English language learners sent to speech therapy instead of formal ESL classes. “Schools may think these kids have special learning needs because they don’t seem to be learning,” Cody says. “In reality, they’re just learning the language.”
As immigrant populations grow across rural America, newcomers often find themselves facing situations similar to those of Cruz’s childhood – living in school districts unaccustomed to educating students whose first language is not English.
Cruz currently serves as the Director of Hispanic Community Engagement for Purdue University Extension and previously served as a Health and Humanities Educator for Purdue University Extension in Clinton County, Indiana.
Local multilingual education researchers say schools with ESL or bilingual systems range from top-notch bilingual education programs, like Dubois County’s, to ESL sessions where students miss parts of class and don’t receive instruction in their native language.
Cody said that in areas with very small populations of English language learners, schools might pool resources and “hire itinerant teachers — teachers who travel around to multiple rural schools to provide ESL services.”
This is the least effective way to teach multilingually, Cody says, for two reasons: Pulling students out of class is disruptive, and ESL teachers have very limited time to devote to individual students.
Where do you start?
In rural areas, small expansions of local industries that rely heavily on immigrant or migrant workers can mean big changes in student populations, said Holly Hansen Thomas, a bilingual education professor at Texas Woman’s University. “And those teachers may not have the experience or background to serve the emerging bilingual families who are coming out to work and supporting those industries.”
Hansen-Thomas said professional development is a starting point for rural school districts that don’t have much experience offering multilingual education.
Federal grants are available to support multilingual certification for teachers and administrators. For example, the National English Language Acquisition Center National Professional Development ProgrammeHansen Thomas also supports the U.S. Department of Education’s “Newcomer ToolkitThis is a resource for rural educators who want to support recently relocated students and their families.
In Indiana, universities are trying to create manageable pathways for multilingual educators who may not have formal teacher training. “Our teacher prep students tend to be white and monolingual,” says Stephanie Oudogiri, a clinical associate professor in the Purdue University School of Education. “We need multilingual people because our demographics are changing, especially in the Midwest.”
Experts like Cruz stress the importance of listening to non-native English speakers themselves when building these programs. “We’ve had so many focus groups and community discussions, and I can’t tell you how many times people have said, ‘Thank you for having me in this,”‘ Cruz says.
“I think a lot of times they want to be at the negotiating table but they just don’t know how to do it. So we really try to listen to what they have to say and go from there, rather than the other way around.”
