Worcester to expand bilingual education

WORCESTER – Equipped with a couple of new grants from the state, the Worcester schools plan to begin expanding their bilingual program to the high school level next year, with the goal of eventually having a dual language option in every grade.

"We hope to be a K-12 dual language district," said Carmen Melendez, Worcester’s director of English Learner Programs, who oversees the district’s bilingual initiatives. "We’re doing the hard work right now. I feel very confident in saying we’ll get to the 12th grade."

Before this school year, Worcester had dual language programs in English and Spanish at Chandler Magnet School and Roosevelt School, both elementary schools, and at Burncoat Middle School in the seventh grade. Last fall, the district started programs at Woodland Academy, another elementary school, and Burncoat's eighth grade as well.

Next year, the school department’s plan is to offer a bilingual program in the ninth grade at Burncoat High School and then expand it to the upper grades over the subsequent years.

Last week, school officials learned they had received two state grants to help them with that effort: a $90,000 Alternative English Learner Education award intended for the development of bilingual programming, and a $150,000 Gateway City grant aimed at creating a new "grow your own" bilingual educator training program that would serve Worcester and surrounding districts.

According to the state education department, five districts received Alternative English Learner Education programs grants in the latest cycle, while another six received Gateway City grants. Worcester was the only district in Central Massachusetts to receive either award this year.

In addition, Worcester received another $84,000 Gateway City grant from the state, which it plans to use to start a summer high school academy intended to help English language learners improve their literacy skills and explore career options.

"It’s an awesome opportunity," Melendez said of securing those awards. "It was very competitive … we knew it would be hard to get all three of them."

Worcester’s bilingual program expansion, however, was moving forward even without help from the state, she said. "The district is committed to it," Melendez said. "These grants just elevate our work."

Worcester's dual language classrooms, which instruct students in English and Spanish simultaneously, on one hand benefit non-English speakers, who make up an increasingly large percentage of Worcester’s student population.

"The research shows the dual language program is one of the best models for supporting Latino students in closing the achievement gap," Melendez said, referring to the persistently lower success rate for that population compared to white students in metrics such as test scores and graduation rates.

"The transfer of the (English) language becomes much easier when you have a solid foundation in your own language," said Patricia Padilla, principal at Woodland Academy, which as of last year was second only to Chandler Magnet in terms of having the largest percentage of English language learners in the district, at nearly 60%, according to state records.

And school officials said bilingual classes benefit native English speakers, too. "We have students in our program who have never heard or spoken Spanish before," Melendez said. "It’s an open-door kind of program."

"Having the ability to speak two languages only enriches a student’s life," Padilla said, adding that the school also encourages families to continue to use their native language at home to foster their children’s bilingual skills.

So far at Woodland, she said, the dual language program "has gone very well." While it is contained to a single kindergarten classroom currently, Padilla said, officials hope to expand it to the first grade next year and then to the rest of the grades in the future, although "space is always an issue."

The proposed educator training hub, meanwhile, is intended to produce the teachers to run those and other new dual language programs, and not just in Worcester. Melendez said as part of the Gateway City grant the school department received, Worcester’s program will also train teachers from surrounding, smaller districts that don’t have the resources to start their own bilingual classes.