| |||||
|
|||||
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Community turns to Mexico to fill bilingual needs
DALTON, Georgia (CNN) -- Dalia Martinez is a teacher with an international assignment. She has traveled more than a thousand miles from her home in Monterrey, Mexico, to educate Spanish-speaking children in the United States. Four years ago, the city of Dalton, in North Georgia, recruited Martinez and 13 other teachers in an effort to educate its growing population of Hispanic children.
"We didn't really know what we were going to be doing actually, we were just told we were going to help the kids," Martinez said. Martinez now teaches fourth graders at City Park East Elementary School. Her students participate in the school's Language Academy, where the emphasis is on English acquisition. Martinez spends most of her day speaking in English. A bilingual teaching aide, also recruited from Mexico, helps children who need an explanation in Spanish. Classroom exchanges can be a mixture of both languages. More than half of the students in the Dalton Public School system are Hispanic. A decade ago, it was 4 percent. Many of the city's Hispanic workers were drawn by jobs at local carpet mills. The city of 28,000 boasts the title, "The Carpet Capital of the World." The flood of new immigrant students initially overwhelmed teachers, who struggled with language and cultural barriers. In 1997, by pooling private and public funds, local attorney Erwin Mitchell and other community leaders started the Georgia Project, a teacher exchange program. A few weeks during the summer, native English-speaking teachers from the city's school district go to Monterrey for language and cultural immersion. The teachers from Mexico work in Dalton for one-year terms. "The strategy was simply to find a way for the children to learn the English language," Mitchell said. "But then we found that the best way to accomplish that is to get bilingual teachers of the same culture." Help at school, visits to homeMartinez, a Mexican national, said she has a lot in common with her students. "It's incredible how different they act when someone speaks their same language," she said.
Martinez said the hardest part of her job is teaching a classroom of newcomers whose English proficiency is at different levels, because their Spanish skills also vary. "Some of them do know how to read in Spanish; some of them came but didn't really know how to read in Spanish," explained Martinez. "So then we put them all together, and it's just like 'okay, how do I do this so the one who knows a lot will not feel like I'm just putting him down just because of the other.'" Martinez spends time with her students inside and outside the classroom. She makes home visits, which offer parents who may speak Spanish their only chance to get involved in their child's schooling. School officials and civic leaders from around the country are increasingly expressing interest in the program. It is a model for a newly proposed federal grant program, introduced by Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat from Georgia. While the program has been called a success, some question its long-term viability. "The fact is recruiting teachers from other locales is only a short-term answer," said Delia Pompa, the executive director of the National Association for Bilingual Education. "We've got to really figure it out -- in every community -- how we are going to prepare teachers to be able to work with the children who are in that community." RELATED SITES: NABE Web site | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||
Terms under which this service is provided to you. | Read our privacy guidelines.