Bilingual school just 40% Spanish

Six of ten students to be English speakers

The waiting list of parents willing to pay tuition for Denver’s new dual-language school has grown to 120, but there wasn’t enough scholarship money for Spanish speakers. So for the first year, 40 percent of the school’s 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds will be native Spanish speakers, 60 percent native English speakers.

‘The 50-50 model is ideal, but 60-40 works,’ said the school’s first principal, JoAnn Trujillo Hays, now principal of Boulder’s Washington Bilingual School.

Dual language immersion results in bilingual fluency by the fifth grade but requires close to a 50-50 class split in order to work. Hays said the 3- and 4-year-olds will have 75 percent of their school day in their native language. Starting at 5 years of age, 50 percent of the day will be in English, 50 percent in Spanish.

The new DPS school at West 37th Avenue and Zuni Street also will be a Montessori school, the only public Montessori dual-language immersion school in the country.

Full tuition at the school is $ 355 a month, partial pay is $ 155 and full scholarship is $ 35. That’s for a three-hour day; additional child care is available for a fee.

Tuition is charged because the state doesn’t pay for early-childhood education and pays for only a half-day of kindergarten.

Starting at first grade – in the school’s second year – tuition won’t be charged.

Negotiations are underway for some of the 3- and 4-year-olds’ tuition to be paid by Rocky Mountain SER Head Start.

‘Our goal in the upcoming year is moving back to 50-50,’ said parent Patrick Ridgeway, who has been working on the school’s creation for four years. The first year is the most expensive.

Ridgeway agreed that a 40-60 split isn’t catastrophic. All the families who applied from the school’s priority neighborhood and who filled out paperwork for scholarships were accepted, he said.

Hays also pointed out that English speakers enrolled at the school are themselves diverse: Chicano, African-American, Asian and Native American in addition to non-Hispanic white.

Hays said the school will require seven bilingual teachers and a coordinator. So far, four teachers have been hired.



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