It is a nondescript red-brick school building on a dreary side street in Roxbury’s gritty Egleston Square.

Coming from neighborhoods battered by the twin scourges of poverty and crime, many students arrive in class with their ability or desire to learn severely hampered by their turbulent home life.

The sounds of sirens drown out the voices of teachers as police wage a relentless battle against the drug dealers who ply their trade on the streets surrounding the school.

Teachers must contend with a broad range of pupil problems, including those of recent arrivals from Central America who have never before gone to school and those of students more concerned about where they will sleep than about their homework assignment.

Meanwhile, the school’s budget is being reduced at the same time a seventh grade is being added to the already overcrowded school, which now runs from kindergarten to sixth grade.

As one teacher said, “We have all the ingredients that have doomed so many inner-city schools.”

Yet, the Rafael Hernandez Elementary School has become one of the jewels of the Boston public schools.

And the Hernandez has succeeded in an area where the city’s school system has failed: providing Hispanic students, who make up more than half the school’s 351 students, with a quality education while instilling in them cultural pride and self-esteem.

The Hernandez treats its racial and ethnic diversity as an asset instead of a liability and has created an environment where being Hispanic and speaking Spanish are respected and indeed celebrated traits.

Strolling through the halls and classrooms and listening to the exchanges between teachers and students provides tangible evidence of the worth the school holds for its large Hispanic body.

Maria Agudo’s kindergarten class, for example, is decorated with bilingual posters explaining the days of the week, the months of the year and certain words, such as corta (cut), colorea (crayon), dobla (fold) and pega (paste).

At the heart of the Hernandez’s success is an instructional strategy that provides bilingual education to all students, not just a small number of non-English speakers who in other schools would be segregated in a tiny section of the building.

At the Hernandez, students whose primary language is English learn Spanish, while those better versed in Spanish learn English. As a result, it is not unusual to hear students, even those with Irish and Italian surnames, speaking in Spanish.

In the basement cafeteria recently a group of fourth graders was enjoying a brief respite from classwork. Their chatter ranged from the latest class gossip to platitudes about their favorite pop stars.

While their conversation was not unusual, that they were speaking in Spanish was. Although one of the girls was Puerto Rican, the other three had Irish surnames. Yet they were able to hold their own in a language they had only recently learned.

“I think that if the Spanish kids are trying to learn English then it’s only fair that I try to learn Spanish,” said Adrienne Campbell-Holt, one of the fourth graders and the daughter of School Committee member Stephen Holt.

Known formally as two-way bilingual instruction, the Hernandez’s educational approach has placed it in the vanguard of a national movement to revamp the traditional delivery of bilingual education in order to reverse the poor academic performance of many Hispanic students.

“Bilingual education is not long for this world unless it can change its perception as a sort of remedial program,” said Charles Glenn, a state Department of Education official who monitors the Boston public schools and who has three children attending the Hernandez. “If we’re really supportive of bilingual education, we have to reconceptualize it as a form of enrichment for all the kids. We have to picture it as Hispanic kids coming to school already smart. These kids should not be separated and made to feel different or less able because they speak Spanish.”

The Hernandez, by employing the two-way bilingual model, has meshed what many see as the best aspects of traditional bilingual programs, including sensitivity to Latino culture and providing Hispanic role models, with the need to integrate a linguistic minority into the regular education program.

“Folks have gotten themselves locked into the idea that there are only two positions,” Glenn said. “One says let’s create this separate entity that we can control, that provides a lot of jobs and provides a nurturing environment for our kids. Or, let’s put them into an English program and destroy their language and malign their culture. It doesn’t have to be that way, and the Hernandez is proof that a different approach can work.”

But simply adopting a new educational ideology is no panacea for the litany of social and economic challenges inner-city schools like the Hernandez must tackle. Principal Margarita Muniz has fashioned a corps of teachers and support staff dedicated to the success of the two-way bilingual program.

“This is an unbelievably caring staff,” said Abraham Abadi, a sixth-grade teacher in his first year at the Hernandez. “It sounds like baloney, but I’ve been in a lot of other schools where that’s not the case.”

“Hispanic students suffer from the social and economic ills of their community,” said Muniz, prinicpal of the Hernandez since 1980 and widely regarded as one of the best school administrators in the Boston system. “But this is not an excuse for them to fail or for us to fail them. If the way schools have traditionally been educating Hispanics has not worked then we are going to do it differently.

“Our kids need a lot of nurturing, they need to be loved. Every child has intelligence, ability and wants to succeed, and we find ways to draw that out. But some of the traditional ways of doing that – like telling a kid to open his book to page 52 and work on the problems – is not going to work. We try not to do that here.”

Indeed, the Hernandez has instituted educational practices that have proven successful for Hispanic students elsewhere, including cooperative learning in which youngsters in small groups work together on projects and peer tutoring in which older students help children in lower grades.

In Virginia Dunn’s first-grade class one recent day, for example, Israel de la Cruz, a sixth grader, was leading the younger students in a game. “It makes him feel good about himself and gives the youngsters an older Latino they can look up to,” Dunn said.

The Hernandez’s educational formula has produced some academic success stories. Of the 41 sixth graders this year, 15 took the examination to gain admittance to the prestigious city high schools Boston Latin and Boston Latin Academy. Six, two of whom are Hispanic, have been accepted to one of the two schools. Three of the six were among the seven top citywide scorers on the high school admission test.

Judging by the school’s waiting list, among the longest in the city, the Hernandez enjoys a strong reputation among parents. Educators inside and outside the system say the school ranks within the top 10 of the city’s 70 elementary schools. Muniz said the school should also be measured by whether each student is fulfilling his or her potential.

“If a child has progressed from where they started in September to the end of the year, then we’ve done our job well,” Muniz said in an interview in her spacious office, where the doors are rarely closed and where students drop by just to chat or get a hug.

“This is definitely a child-oriented school, meaning that the overriding concern is not that the curriculum is implemented or that certain test scores are achieved, but that a child’s needs are met, that they reach their level of potential and that school be a fun, positive experience,” said Maryann Byrne, a second-grade teacher here since 1973.

An innovative educational strategy alone, however, does not explain why Hispanic students fare so well at the Hernandez. What has transformed this school into a beacon of hope for Hispanic students is a level of understanding, respect and sensitivity for Hispanic culture difficult to find in other Boston public schools. Much of that is due to the Hernandez’s 19 teachers, 11 of whom are Hispanic – a proportion unmatched by any other school.

“The children not only have role models but teachers who are going to see them for what they are – children with unlimited potential – as opposed to non-Latino faculty who often see our children with a bias,” said Ralph Rivera, a research associate on Hispanic issues at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His daughter, Luna Mari Rivera, is a Hernandez third grader.

The value the Hernandez places on diversity has made the school a place where race and ethnicity have been largely removed as barriers to friendships among its students.

“It’s the most integrated school we visited where you not only have a mix of blacks, whites and Hispanics but they actually mingle, which is something I didn’t find in the other schools,” said Becky Pierce, the parent of a sixth grader.

“There’s an awareness here that you can be Hispanic, Anglo or black and can be very proud of that, but it doesn’t mean you have to confine yourself to that group,” said Carlo Buzzi, who teaches “English as a Second Language.” “I wish every school were a multicultural and multilingual school, because that’s the future of this country.”



Comments are closed.