Frustrated by the continuing shortage of qualified bilingual teachers, Sweeney Elementary School Principal Bill Beacham took matters into his own hands a few years ago and snagged $800,000 in federal funding for bilingual programs at his school.

Sweeney is the only school in Santa Fe to have landed one of these federal grants, which are earmarked for schools with a high number of immigrant students. Nearly half of Sweeney’s 675 pupils are from Mexico.

Beacham is using the money to turn six of his already-bilingual teacher assistants into full-fledged teachers. Ten teachers are studying to add the bilingual qualification to their licenses.

Beacham’s strategy is a clever one it capitalizes on Sweeney’s existing resources, and provides a boost to workers who might not otherwise have been able to pursue such career enhancements.

With the grant money, Sweeney also has invested in books in Spanish for the school’s library, produced a video for immigrant parents about their rights and started bilingual after-school and summer programs.

But Beacham is worried about what will happen to these programs when the grant runs out in two years. His concern isn’t misplaced only about $400,000 of the $1.4 million in state bilingual education funding that Santa Fe schools receive goes directly into programs such as Sweeney’s.

Almost half of that $1.4 million goes into the district’s operational fund, where it helps pay the salaries of the district’s bilingual teachers.

That may sound like a reasonable use of money earmarked for bilingual education, since bilingual teachers are paid more than their monolingual counterparts. But it’s not as smart as it sounds. Bilingual teachers don’t fill “extra” teaching slots if they weren’t in the classroom, a non-bilingual teacher would be. The district would have to pay those teachers out of its general operating budget, and bilingual advocates argue that the district shouldn’t be raiding bilingual education funds to cover salaries it would have to pay anyway.

These advocates also argue that the way to build better bilingual programs is to do what Sweeney and the Albuquerque Public Schools are doing. In Albuquerque, 90 percent of total bilingual revenues are spent directly on bilingual programs in the schools. Just like at Sweeney, Albuquerque’s bilingual funds go for teacher training and books, after-school programs and other materials not for teacher salaries.

The Santa Fe schools’ bilingual education task force expects to ask the school board to emulate Albuquerque’s example, and put most of our district’s bilingual funding directly into school programs.

The change seems long overdue. Although it’s the third largest school in the district, Sweeney isn’t the only school with a substantial number of immigrant students. The number of these students has been growing, and with it, the importance of having bilingual teachers in the classrooms.

Another point: Bilingual teachers help Spanish speakers master English. But they also help English-only students learn at least some Spanish. In a city as proud of its Spanish heritage as Santa Fe is, that’s pretty important, too.



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