HAVERHILL—At age 11, Ana Maria Hidalgo would sit in a bank or a doctor’s office, translating Spanish and English for her mother and other adults. Like many children of recent immigrants, she could speak easily about dollar amounts in the thousands or medical symptoms and treatments.

Hidalgo, who came to Haverhill from the Dominican Republic when she was 2, grew up speaking only Spanish at home and English outside the house.

She wasn’t prepared for the shock she felt when she walked into her first Spanish class in Haverhill High School two years ago at age 15.

“The kids were so advanced in Spanish, I would not talk,” she recalled. “They were saying things like, ‘It’s sunny outside.’ Their conversation was so carefree. I thought to myself, ‘I can’t speak Spanish that way.’ “

Today, thanks to the bilingual program in Haverhill High School, Hidalgo, 17, can say firmly and with self-assurance that she is bilingual. She plans to attend college and wants to be an FBI agent.

For the last 20 years, Haverhill, a city of 51,500, has been home to growing numbers of Hispanics such as Hidalgo. There are more than 7,000 students in the public schools, 300 of whom are in traditional bilingual education in Spanish. About 860 of the students, or slightly more than 12 percent, have Spanish as a primary language.

Haverhill offers transitional bilingual education from kindergarten through Grade 12, and the program, by law, aims to make students proficient enough to stay in an English-only class at the end of three years.

It also offers a kindergarten program in which English-speaking and Spanish-speaking youngsters learn each others’ languages, and the high school offers Spanish for native speakers.

Graciela Trilla, who has taught Hidalgo for 2 1/2 years, believes English will, and should, remain the prevailing language of the United States. The goal of bilingual education, she said, should be “to be fluent and literate in two languages. A bilingual person needs to feel graceful in both worlds. It’s a huge empowerment to walk out with literacy in your own language, to have the power and intelligence of that language.”

Trilla, who teaches Spanish for the Native Speaker, Bilingual I and II and Advanced Placement Spanish, said the multilingual world ahead makes it important to develop truly bilingual people.

Students who don’t connect with their native language the way Hidalgo has, Trilla said, have to repress themselves and may have to deal with that later in their lives.

Reared in New York by Puerto Rican parents, Trilla, too, spoke but did not study Spanish intensively until she reached Yale University, a progression that gives her an appreciation for what her students face. Hidalgo is one of 50 out of 300 Hispanic students at Haverhill High School who study Spanish at the high-school level.

“The other 250 are out there walking the part, but not feeling part of it,” Trilla said.

Near a courtyard at the high school with slides and a sandbox, the kindergarten program called Amigos aims to keep these young children connected with their Hispanic culture and language as they learn English. On this sunny day, 40 five-year-olds count to 20, sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in Spanish and English and chant “Uno, dos, tres estrellitas,” “One, two, three little stars.”

Maria Vasquez, who teaches two sessions of five-day bilingual kindergarten and combines her students with the English-speaking class of Patricia Smith twice a week, said she provides a model of a person who speaks two languages. A native-born Colombian, she, too, began studying English in kindergarten.

The goal of the Amigos program, Vasquez said, is to help Hispanic children build their self-confidence and feel good about their own culture. She wants them to value aspects of both cultures.

The two kindergartens had Thanksgiving dinner together.

“We want all the students to know each other,” she said, “to make friends in another language” as they take field trips and have recess.

The English-speaking children are developing an appreciation for the Hispanic and other cultures, but for her Spanish-speaking students, “I want them to get English skills and think in English.”

English-speaking parents volunteer to have their children participate in the Amigos kindergarten program. The youngsters scatter to neighborhood schools for first grade; Vasquez said there are plans to extend Amigos to first and second grades.

Vasquez’s Hispanic students will continue in transitional bilingual classes through the fourth grade. Native Spanish speakers no longer in the bilingual program can study Spanish as a foreign language, but not as a native language, in middle school.

“There is a gap for native speakers to develop as a bilingual person” in the Haverhill system, said Rick Whaley, director of bilingual education for the city. “It seems incongruous that we should be encouraging English-speaking students from Grade 6 on to learn a different language, but insist that those who already speak a language other than English learn English to the exclusion of their native language.”

Haverhill has neither the resources nor a stable enough Hispanic population at the moment to fill in that gap, he said.

Federal research, Whaley said, shows it can take 5 to 7 years for a person to be able to compete with students whose first language is English. Massachusetts, he said, “is saddled with a three-year law” for bilingual education. The 1971 law requires schools to provide an English program for non-English speaking students when there are 20 or more in a district in the same language group. “Although we try to comply with the three-year law,” Whaley said, “there are gaps in language proficiency between the end of the third year and the 5 to 7 years cited in the research, which will make using English as a medium of instruction very difficult.”

The problems experienced by students newly emerged from bilingual education and teachers unprepared for them in the mainstream curriculum have contributed to the dropout rate, Whaley said.

David Reed, a native English speaker who is bilingual in Spanish, teaches ESL biology and US history as well as bilingual social studies and general science.

“If you have the opportunity to be bilingual, take it,” Reed said. “Then take the most advantage of two languages and use them in anything and everything. That culture represents you.”



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