Parents Struggle With The Ways Gentrification Changes A Bilingual Schools
On an unusually cold October day, children were exercising on the gleaming floor of Powell Blingual Elementary in Washington DC’s Petworth neighborhood. It was an overcast, rainy day but the school’s picture windows allowed the natural light to pour in and highlight all of primary colors of student’s artwork – some of which featured maps naming countries in English and Spanish and drawings of Frida Kahlo.
“I need your energy, guys. I need energy. Mas energia, por favor!” a man instructed the students.
All over Powell’s walls, you will find forms and flyers for parents in both English and Spanish, including one for Hispanic Heritage Month, which will be celebrated at the school this week. High parental involvement is essential to Powell and teachers and administration do a lot of work to reach out to families by scheduling home visits, which allow teachers to visit a child’s home and observe how much the child speaks certain languages versus others, and setting up parent and principal meetings once every month.
Powell has one parent meeting at 9 a.m. and another at 5:30 p.m. to make sure all parents are included. Primarily Spanish-speaking parents tend to go to the morning meeting, where there is a professional translator, and primarily English-speaking parents attend the evening meeting, where parents fulfill the role of translator if needed. Because Powell is a neighborhood school, it has been affected by Petworth’s gentrification over the years. Parents have also come from outside of Petworth to attend the school as the reputation of its bilingual program grew.
Carla Ferris used to be one of a very small number of white parents at Powell. Her son is in preschool and her daughter is in first grade.
“This neighborhood is gentrifying and the schools are gentrifying. So my first year at Powell? I was the blonde lady … And they used to mix me up with another blonde lady. But it’s totally different now,” Ferris said.
She decided to enroll her child in daughter at Powell instead of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, which is across the street from her home, because it was important to her and her husband, who is from El Salvador, that their daughter be able to speak Spanish and have ties to her culture.
Artwork by pre-K students at Powell Bilingual Elementary
“What I love about Powell is that the Spanish they get there is a lot more organic. I wanted a school where they would have a lot of native speakers that were their playmates. For so many reasons, you know, like cultural differences, family differences, language differences,” Ferris said. “For the longest time, our daughter would flatly refuse to speak Spanish. She could understand a little but she wouldn’t speak it. And after kindergarten, when they started really teaching them Spanish, all of a sudden, girl loves to speak Spanish. She speaks it with her friends. So that’s been really interesting.”
Powell’s white student population has grown from 1 percent in the 2010-2011 academic year to 5 Parents Struggle With The Ways Gentrification Changes A Bilingual Schools | ThinkProgress: