{"id":20799,"date":"2013-12-01T20:07:56","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T01:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=20799"},"modified":"2013-12-01T19:43:34","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T00:43:34","slug":"in-immokalee-parents-promise-to-speak-spanish-with-their-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/12\/01\/in-immokalee-parents-promise-to-speak-spanish-with-their-children\/","title":{"rendered":"In Immokalee, Parents Promise To Speak Spanish With Their Children"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Immokalee<\/a>

Wilson Sayre \/ WLRN<\/p>

Immokalee Community School offers classes to help parents encourage bilingual children.<\/p><\/div>\n

To get into Florida colleges and universities, you have to have studied\u2014or be able to speak\u2014a second language. But Florida students don\u2019t have to take foreign language classes to graduate from high school.<\/p>\n

So in a part of the state where most families already speak a second language, Immokalee Community School is leaning on parents to make sure their children stay bilingual. As a condition of their children attending the school, every parent has signed a contract to speak Spanish with their kids for at least 30 minutes a day, most days of the week.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an unusual effort to keep the students of Immokalee Community School from losing their Spanish\u2014something that often happens between generations of immigrants.<\/p>\n

\nhttps:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/11\/ImmokaleeSpanish_web.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/p>\n

\u201cAll the Spanish I\u2019ve learned I\u2019ve had to learn through school, through work,\u201d says Cece Estrada, a social worker at the school. She grew up in Immokalee, her family migrated with the crops. When they spoke to her in Spanish, she answered in English\u2014and she didn\u2019t grow up bilingual.<\/p>\n

\"Cece<\/a>

Wilson Sayre \/ WLRN<\/p>

Cece Estrada is a social worker at the school.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why I encourage it, because now I understand how important it is to be able to have that second language,\u201d says Estrada.<\/p>\n

Immokalee Community School<\/a> is an RCMA charter school serving the largely Mexican and Central American migrant communities in this small, agricultural town in Central Florida. The school is 94% Hispanic, and most of the parents speak Spanish at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should never see the home language that a student brings to the classroom as some kind of problem that needs to be fixed,\u201d says Robert Linquanti, a researcher and policy advisor with WestEd<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s a resource that can be built on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Linquanti points out there\u2019s a lot of research showing that speaking more than one language is associated with all sorts of benefits<\/a>\u2014better multitasking skills, more developed critical thinking, stronger math skills.<\/p>\n

Florida has a history of pioneering dual language education. Coral Way Elementary School in Miami was the first school in the United States to offer bilingual education in 1963. Trina Sargalski from partner station WLRN\u00a0profiled the school 50 years<\/a> after its first dual language class:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was\u00a0supposed<\/i>\u00a0to be a temporary curriculum to help Cuban students retain their language and culture, while people waited for the Castro regime to fall.<\/p>\n

Today the school, which has since expanded to the eighth grade, continues to thrive.\u00a0Coral Way’s elementary students spend about 60% of the day learning in English and 40% learning in Spanish.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The movement to encourage bilingual children is also getting attention at the federal level.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is going to be a priority for me,\u201d says Libby Doggett, deputy assistant secretary for policy and early learning at the U.S. Department of Education. When she spoke earlier this fall at a conference on Hispanic early learning issues in Miami, she told a crowd that she\u2019d like to see more bilingual support as early as preschool.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve seen the research: it\u2019s clear. We are losing an asset these children have,\u201d says Doggett.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To get into Florida colleges and universities, you have to have studied\u2014or be able to speak\u2014a second language. But Florida students don\u2019t have to take foreign language classes to graduate from high school. So in a part of the state where most families already speak a second language, Immokalee Community School is leaning on parents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[895,1064],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20799"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20806,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799\/revisions\/20806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}