This story was originally published by The Daily Yonder.
In rural America, non-native English speakers are less likely than their urban peers to receive adequate support in school, sometimes leading to lower educational attainment throughout their lives. However, some rural schools are developing multilingual education strategies that rival those found in urban and suburban districts.
In general, it’s easier to fund a more diverse course offering at larger schools. From Advanced Placement U.S. History to Spanish immersion, more students means more funding. But in rural DuBois County, Indiana, administrators are prioritizing the education of English learners. There, students have access to “gold standard” multilingual programming — a hard-earned achievement for any American school, but especially for such a small district.
“We are the only school in the region that has started a dual language program,” said Rossina Sandoval, director of community engagement for the Southwest DuBois County School District, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
To meet the gold standard, students in the dual language immersion program receive 50 percent of their instruction in English and 50 percent in Spanish. Fifty percent of the program is made up of students whose native language is Spanish and the other half is made up of native English speakers. The program is currently offered from kindergarten through third grade, with plans to expand to fourth and fifth grade.
By developing a program with 50/50 language instruction and 50/50 student enrollment, students can not only learn their native language and the target language from their teachers, but they can also learn from each other, Sandoval said.
“That has proven to be the most effective way to develop language skills,” he said.
When the program was first introduced, the school received criticism from both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking families. Spanish-speaking families felt that the school should prioritize learning English, since their children already spoke Spanish at home. And English-speaking families feared that they would not be able to help their children with Spanish homework.
To address the concerns of both families, the school shared information about the benefits of formal bilingual education. In addition to maintaining their conversational skills, Spanish-speaking students receive instruction in grammar, spelling, and reading in their native language. This approach helps students who already speak another language to read and write in another language as well.
Learning two languages does not impair a student's ability to master either language. Bilingual children are shown have better concentration and logical reasoning and, according to Sandoval, be suitable for a wider range of opportunities in the workforce.
“It’s natural, we want the best for our children,” he said. “The best thing we can do is educate the community as a whole to understand that this is the best method to develop multilingualism, to improve global skills and to form global citizens.”
Intersecting problems
DuBois County’s Latino population has been growing for decades. Today, it accounts for 9.5 percent, which is about half the national percentage. But in southwest DuBois County schools, more than a third of students identify as Latino. (The disparity in those numbers reflects higher birth rates within the Latino population and the uneven distribution of those families within the county.)
The demographics of rural schools have been changing across the country. According to a recent study report According to data from the National Rural Education Association, 80,000 more English-language learners and multilingual students were enrolled in rural districts in the 2021 school year than in 2013.
Historically, rural school districts have struggled to provide high-quality education to non-native English speakers. When English learner populations are small, it can be difficult to fund robust bilingual programming and easy to overlook the need for it.
Rural English learners find themselves at the intersection of overlapping structural problems in public education. national teacher shortage The situation is worse in non-metropolitan locations and is most problematic in rural schools with racial diversity and high poverty. Nationally, there are not enough bilingual educators or educators certified to teach English as a second language (ESL).
According Recent researchWhile English learner populations are growing in rural areas, rural multilingual students are less likely to receive instruction in their native languages. And while federal guidelines call for all non-native English speakers to receive specialized instruction, in rural areas only a little over 60 percent actually do so.
DuBois County’s top-notch bilingual education program should be used as a model in other rural school districts, Sandoval said: “As an immigrant, as an American citizen, I feel very proud … because this can be replicated in communities that look like ours.”
Support for these programs must come from within and outside of school, Sandoval said: “There has to be a degree of openness toward bilingualism or multilingualism. This is an effort that is not just my responsibility, it is the responsibility of the school and the community.”
Programs that increase accessibility and parent confidence include “Café en el Parque,” a parent meeting held in Spanish that attracts more than 100 families each month, and the “Bilingüe Emergente” program, which meets after school and on weekends to help new immigrant students and their families learn more about how the American education system works.
Programs that help build community support and engagement include “Fuertes Together,” a partnership with the public library where families can hear stories in Spanish and English and participate in cultural music, dance and art. And a new program, “Bilingual Village,” helps bilingual students identify conversation partners in the community who can converse in the student’s new language.
A wide range of strategies
When Esmeralda Cruz was a child in the 1990s, she immigrated with her family from Mexico to rural Clinton County, Indiana, where she lives and works today. “Back then,” she said, “there weren’t many Latino families in the area. In my first-grade class, I only had one classmate who was bilingual.” This posed major challenges to her education: Esmeralda said that instead of receiving adequate language instruction, she was placed in classes meant to address learning disabilities.
Cruz’s experience is not unique, according to Maria Coady, a professor of multilingual education at North Carolina State University. In places not accustomed to supporting immigrant populations, she has seen English learners sent to speech therapy instead of English as a Second Language classes. “Schools may think all these kids have special learning needs because it seems like they’re not learning,” she said, “when in reality, they’re just learning the language.”
As immigrant populations grow in rural America, newcomers often find themselves in the same situation Cruz did as a child: navigating school districts unaccustomed to educating non-native English speakers.
Cruz currently serves as the Hispanic Community Engagement Manager for Purdue Extension. Prior to that, she was a health and human sciences educator at the Purdue Extension office in Clinton County, Indiana.
According to scholars of rural multilingual education, schools with ESL or bilingual systems exist on a wide spectrum, from flagship bilingual education programs like DuBois County's to ESL sessions that require students to miss part of the school day and provide no instruction in their native language.
In places with very small English learner populations, Coady said, schools could pool resources and “bring in a roving teacher, meaning a teacher who could travel between several rural schools to provide ESL services.”
This is the least effective method of multilingual education for two reasons, Coady said: It's disruptive to remove students from class, and ESL teachers can only offer very limited amounts of time to individual students.
Where to start?
In rural areas, small expansions of local industries that rely heavily on immigrant and migrant labor can create major shifts in student populations, said Holly Hansen-Thomas, a professor of bilingual education at Texas Woman's University. “And these teachers may not have the experience or background to serve these emerging bilingual families who continue to come to work and support the industry.”
For rural school districts that don't have experience providing multilingual education, Hansen-Thomas said, professional development is the place to start.
There are federal grants to support multilingual certifications for teachers and administrators. For example, the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition offers a National Professional Development Programwhich provides grants to colleges and universities to fund work on multilingual teaching skills for local educators. Hansen-Thomas also points to the U.S. Department of Education's programBeginner's Tool Kit”, a resource for rural educators seeking to support recent immigrant students and families.
In Indiana, universities are trying to create viable pathways for multilingual educators who have not received formal teacher training. “Our future teachers tend to be white and monolingual,” said Stephanie Oudghiri, a clinical assistant professor in Purdue’s College of Education. “Especially in the Midwest, as our demographics are changing, we need people who are multilingual.”
Experts like Cruz stress the importance of listening to non-native English speakers when developing these programs. “We’ve had a lot of focus groups and community conversations and I can’t tell you how many times people at the table have said, ‘Thank you for including me,’” Cruz said.
“I think a lot of times they want to be at the table, but they don’t know how, so we make sure we listen to them and go from there, rather than the other way around.”
