Parents of third-graders in Willard Elementary School teacher Terry Maslanka’s class are often baffled when their children ask for homework help. For half those parents, it’s because their native language is English.

Maslanka teaches in Evanston/Skokie School District 65’s Two-Way Immersion program, in which students learn in both English and Spanish from kindergarten to fifth grade. As the first class to complete TWI prepares to graduate ninth grade, school board members said the program is working well despite concerns about its students’ ability to pass standardized tests.

“It helps with both languages,” Maslanka said. “They’re able to use one language to help them with the other.”

Of the 20 students in Maslanka’s class, 11 speak Spanish at home, and the rest speak English. She teaches in both languages every day. A typical day’s lesson might involve reading comprehension in English and writing alliterative poems in Spanish.

In order to enroll a child in TWI, English-speaking parents must submit a request to the principal of one of the five schools that offer the program, said second-grade teacher Anne McKenna, who teaches in TWI at Dewey Elementary School. Students who speak Spanish as their first language are automatically enrolled.

“The foundation of the TWI program is that children are learning concepts, and it really doesn’t matter if they’re learning in English or Spanish,” McKenna said.

However, the program sometimes faces criticism for isolating students, McKenna said. TWI students stay together in one class for all of elementary school, and the program doesn’t force Spanish speakers to integrate into English-only classrooms.

To combat isolation, Dewey Elementary brings TWI and general education classes together for subjects such as art and music, McKenna said. It also holds school-wide events relevant to TWI’s curriculum, including a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration in September.

Willard Elementary takes a similar approach to preventing isolation, Maslanka said.A more pressing concern for TWI is whether its curriculum meshes with the demands of the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, Maslanka said. The ISAT, which students must take every year from third to eighth grade, does not make accommodations for language barriers.

In the lower grades, students who are taught to be bilingual may not perform at the same level as students who are monolingual when it comes to reading in English, which could affect the ISAT because it puts particular emphasis on reading skills, Maslanka said.

Though she had no statistics pertaining to her own students, students in bilingual programs at other schools often perform worse on standardized tests than their counterparts in standard curriculums, Maslanka said.

But TWI goes beyond test scores, she said.

“Being with children who speak another language, they’ve learned to be cooperative,” she said of her students. “They’re learning tolerance.”

School board members seem to agree that TWI’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks. At a meeting in February, the board debated moving TWI classes from overcrowded elementary schools to magnet schools. But board member Tracy Quattrocki said this plan is not being actively discussed.

Board member Katie Bailey said the district needs to come up with a long-term solution to managing enrollment. But she said she doesn’t foresee major changes to TWI.

“As long as it continues to show that it’s educating our English language learners, I expect it to continue to be the district’s policy,” Bailey said.

McKenna, who won a $5,000 Kohl McCormick Early Childhood Teaching Award this month for her work in TWI, said she hopes that will be the case.

“It is really amazing how well it works,” she said.[email protected]