Dist. 46 teachers, parents react to claims about bilingual program

More than 100 people gathered in the Elgin Area Unit District 46 board room Tuesday night to respond to a school board member’s public comments about the district’s bilingual program.

David Dominguez, an Elgin resident, represented the concerns of the district’s bilingual parents advisory council.

“We believe that this board member does not have the support evidence and the adequate knowledge to make that kind of statement,” Dominguez said. “We invite the board of education to increase its knowledge about our bilingual program.”

Heaton’s remarks followed the board’s decision last month to revise some of Elgin’s elementary school boundaries, a move that will increase the number of bilingual students at schools that already have high bilingual populations.

Heaton alone opposed that decision, saying the district needs to address larger problems affecting all the elementary schools. He used the bilingual program as an example because he had been reading about bilingual education in an education journal earlier that week.

Heaton did not respond to the group publicly but said later he is glad he the community came out in support of the program. As someone who worked as a missionary in a Peru for two years, Heaton said he has experienced bilingual education firsthand.

He emphasized again, though, that the 90 minutes of English instruction second-graders get in Puerto Rico is more than children in District 46 receive. “I see some of our children in some of these programs and how it takes them to learn English,” Heaton said.

Lisa Setzke, a bilingual teacher at Hillcrest Elementary School, read a letter composed by other bilingual and English-as-a-second-language teachers in District 46.

“Mr. Heaton’s statement concerns us because we feel he is not aware of the amount of English being taught within our program. This lack of knowledge, when verbalized, could be erroneously perceived by our community and could create the beginning of a schism among us,” Setzke said, as the large group of teachers, parents and community members stood silently behind her.



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