Spanish Immersion

Back before I married Jeff, Mandy and I were living in Fort Wayne, Indiana. To recap, I was born in the Seattle area, moved to the Sacramento area around twelve and then to Indiana at 26, still with me. My dad was transfered for both of the above moves and I wanted to be near my family so I moved to Indiana with Mandy. Then my dad retired and moved away and I was in hell alone. But that is another story.

Mandy's local elementary school happened to be a charter school. This charter school decided that they would offer students the opportunity to do a program called Spanish Immersion. The theory was that since kids whose parents do not speak English are able to graduate from high school speaking English fluently... we thought if we made our kids speak nothing but Spanish at school they would graduate speaking Spanish fluently. Starting in Kindergarten the kids would spend half the day with a teacher who only spoke to them in Spanish. They wouldn't be teaching them Spanish in the traditional way, vocabulary words, verb conjugations, they would just conduct the business of kindergarten in Spanish. The other half of the day the kids would go to their other teacher who spoke English. The Spanish teacher taught them math and science and the English teacher taught them reading, writing, social studies.

The kids were kept together k-5th and in 6th they all moved on to the junior high school. Mandy's class was about five or six years into the program so it was running very smoothly. The parents were very involved in this process, we had meetings, fund raisers, etc almost weekly. We all did girl scouts and birthday parties, play dates etc. The same group of less than 20 kids were together in school and out of school for all those years. Except, half way through 4th grade I married Jeff and we moved to Italy.

Mandy has kept in touch with many of the kids from her Spanish Immersion class. Saturday while Mandy was on her break at work her cell phone rang. It was one of her friends from Spanish Immersion, her friend was right then at a reunion party of their Spanish Immersion class, at the home of Mandy's 1st Grade Spanish teacher. Mandy got the chance to speak to many of the kids and teachers. They passed the phone around and were excited to hear about all of Mandy's travels.

I told Mandy if she can get her driver's license we can drive up to Fort Wayne for the next reunion. At the time we were practicing in an empty parking lot, she was upset that I was making her practice while she was telling me about her phone call. I wonder if any of those kids are fluent in Spanish. I know that Mandy didn't take any more Spanish until high school and it came to her very easily, she gets 100's on everything without even studying. But, that is just Mandy not sure if it is from the immersion...Still the experience was priceless.