Evanston/Skokie School District 65 has delayed action on the bilingual education program that could displace students from Washington Elementary School, asking for information on alternatives.
The district’s bilingual education committee recommended that Washington house the Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program, the district’s experimental bilingual program that began in 2000.
TWI requires that English- and Spanish-speaking students in the same classrooms receive most of their instruction in their native language. Foreign language instruction increases with each grade level and by fourth grade, students are taught half in English, half in Spanish.
While participation in the program exists today on an optional basis, the proposal would bring the TWI program to all kindergarten classes at Washington next year. Gradually, TWI will expand to other grade levels.
Currently there are two groups of TWI students — one at Washington, 914 Ashland Ave., and one at Orrington Elementary School, 2636 Orrington Ave.
At Monday night’s board meeting, parents of Washington students voiced concerns about creating a “bilingual magnet.”
“I think what they were doing is a natural reaction to defend what they perceived as a serious threat to their school,” board member Mary Rita Luecke said Thursday night.
The board decided to consider other options Monday night before voting on the proposal. Alternate proposals include expanding programs at Washington and Orrington or splitting them between Washington and a different school. Another suggestion was to house the program at Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School, 2424 Lake St., which already is a magnet school.
“We haven’t made a decision,” board member Betsy Sagan said. “We want the administration to go back and look at the possibility of expanding TWI … but it doesn’t answer the long-term question, which is, what are we going to do with it in the future?”
The board will likely have to change the TWI program by mid-March, Sagan said, in order to give future Washington parents time to decide whether to enroll students for next year.
Current Washington students would not be affected by a change. Only incoming kindergartners would have to choose either to begin the TWI program next year or to attend the closest general-education school.
Many of the parents said they had moved in order to send their children to Washington for its diversity and facilities. Washington serves 69 percent of Evanston’s Latino community, and roughly 40 percent of the school is Latino.
Although some parents felt that English-speaking students were being unfairly treated, Gale said that Limited English Proficiency students who had long been transported around the district for bilingual education finally would receive education under one roof.
“I think at the next meeting you will be hearing from different voices and it won’t be predominantly one-sided,” Gale said. “I know the total TWI population said they didn’t speak because they thought the board would represent them but they feel that was probably an error.”
Northwestern education Prof. Marjorie Orellana said that many Latino families felt marginalized by opposition to the plan.
“The decision of the committee to form a single school for TWI is really the only pedagogically sound decision to make,” Orellana said. “The Latino community has long been delivered inferior education in this district with the pullout model of bilingual education and bussing them into far ends of Evanston”
Action on a one-school proposal may have been indefinitely postponed, but the board will consider interim proposals as early as Feb. 18.
