Students' tongues untied

Roxbury school has all talking in 2 languages

The entrance to the classroom bears two labels: “door” and “puerta.” Signs on the wall display pictures of huevos/eggs, frutas/fruits and vegetales/vegetables.

Tiny children stand in a circle in the middle of the room, hands on hips, singing a song through their wide grins: “Mi cuerpo, mi cuerpo tiene musica.” (“My body, my body has music.”) Clap. Clap.

The group of kindergarten students comprises many backgrounds, ethnicities and races, yet they sing, speak and are taught in English and Spanish. At the Rafael Hernandez School in Roxbury near Egleston Square, the Spanish-speaking students learn English and the English-speaking students learn Spanish, side by side, in the same classroom.

Since its inception in 1971, the Hernandez has been the only two-way bilingual instruction program in the Boston Public School system. From kindergarten to eighth grade, students spend 50 percent of their time functioning in English, the other 50 percent in Spanish.

“They’re totally unafraid of this,” said Ken Larson, a support specialist at the school, looking around the room at the 5-year-old singers. “The kids come in shy the first week, but then they say, ‘OK, this is what we do.’ If we get them at the 4- or 5-year-old level and they go through the eighth grade, obviously we end up with bilingual kids.”

The Hernandez takes a different approach than many of the nations schools, where native Spanish speakers often are cloistered. The impression that some have in those institutions is that the Spanish-speaking students are receiving remedial education.

Before she joined the staff of the Hernandez, kindergarten teacher Carmen Zayas taught classes for Spanish speakers in Chelsea, where she and her students “felt isolated from the rest of the school,” she said.

“I didn’t feel like my children were able to be exposed to English and to mainstream with the rest of the students,” Zayas said.

For sixth-grader Rhyland Gillespie, 12, a native-English speaker, when she entered the school as a kindergartener, it was sink or swim.

“I knew how to say ‘Uno, dos, tres,’ but that was it,” Rhyland said. “It was really weird. I walked in there, and I was blown away. I had no idea what they were saying.”

But that can be a good thing, Zayas said. The students bond with each other as well as pick up “cooperative learning skills when they ask each other ‘What did the teacher say?’ “

A magnet school, the Hernandez has students from across the city. The school’s waiting list is one of the longest in Boston, Larson said. Out of Boston’s 70 elementary schools, the Hernandez is considered one of the top 10 institutions, school officials said.

Maria Campanario-Araica, director of instruction for the school, said officials from schools across the country have visited the Hernandez to observe classes in an attempt to duplicate the program.

Students in other areas could gain a lot by attending a two-way bilingual instruction program, according to Joselynne Then, 11, a sixth-grader at the Hernandez.

“They could get more jobs,” Joselynne said. “Travel a lot to other countries. They could go to a person who speaks Spanish and not be scared to talk.”

Born in the Dominican Republic, when Joselynne arrived at school with her limited vocabulary, she refused to speak much English.

“People understood me,” she said. “They were very nice and always trying to help me speak English.”

Since “language and culture are embedded in one another,” the school’s 385 students also learn about cultures from around the globe, Larson said.

“It’s OK here if you don’t understand in one language to try to flip to another one,” Campanario said. “It’s OK here to celebrate Kwanzaa or Chanukah or Three Kings’ Day. You don’t stand out here as being odd, but in fact the richness of those differences are valued here.”



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