28 ESL students enrolled at Holton schools this year

Classrooms in America’s schools are becoming more diverse places with the addition of students who speak a different language from the rest of the class, and Jackson County is no exception.

As a result, schools are working with new programs and teachers are expanding their training and class plans to include those learn­ing English as a second language, or ESL. All three of the county’s schools have teachers trained to ac­commodate ESL students, it was reported, with the most common language they work with being Spanish.

But in recent years, a number of people from the Central American country of Guatemala have settled in Holton. And even though Span­ish is the official language of that nation, Holton ESL program coor­dinator Michelle Evans notes the language of the Guatemalan stu­dents settling here is different — specifically, they speak one of two different Mayan lan­guage dialects.

“We do have several kids and adults in the school districts who speak Spanish,” Evans said. “But for our kids from Guatemala, Spanish is a second language to them. We’re all second-language Spanish speakers here, so it creates more issues.”

In fact, a significant number of the 28 ESL students served by the Holton school district are from Guatemala, and that has prompted Evans to plan a special mission trip to that country in February to study the language and the culture there. Her goal is to bring back findings and insights that will be useful in helping teachers in Holton — and perhaps other area schools — in teaching Guatemalan stu­dents.

Right now, the Holton school district is the only one of the three county’s school districts that has ESL students enrolled. Evans said that in Holton, there are currently eight ESL students at Colorado Elementary School, seven at Cen­tral Elementary School, five at Holton Middle School and eight at Holton High School.

Jackson Heights Superintendent and Elementary Principal Adrianne Walsh and Royal Valley Superin­tendent John Rundle said that while their respective school districts have had ESL students enrolled in the past, neither has any enrolled this year. However, both schools have teachers and administrators with adequate training to accom­modate such students should any ESL students enroll with them in the future, they said.

In Holton, there are enough ESL students in each of the district’s buildings that administrators “try to put those students in the same classes, so that we’re teaching them the same things,” according to Holton Superintendent Dennis Stones. The main issue with teach­ing them, Stones said, involves overcoming “the language barrier.”

“The kids are intelligent kids. It’s just that the language barrier is the issue,” Stones said. “It’s a little easier with the elementary kids who come into the system, because they’re learning English as they learn to speak. But there still is a language barrier, and we have sev­eral programs that we use and sev­eral consultants we can contact if we can’t get through to them.”

Included in those “consultants,” Stones noted, are interpreters who can answer questions about some words and phrases that may have some district teachers stumped. But with the Guatemalan students, he added, finding an interpreter to de­code the K’iche’ and Chuj dialects of the Mayan language the students speak has been no easy task.

In October, Evans met with the Holton school board about using two professional days and three personal days this coming February to go to Guatemala to research the culture and the language. Board members approved the request for Evans’ trip, which she is paying for out of her own pocket.

“I’m looking for some insights,” she said. “Most of the immigrants we’re seeing coming from Guate­mala are from the same area, and they’re not going to the city schools there. They’re going to one school in a mountain town… It’s not a typical city school.”

Part of Evans’ study, she said, will focus on the curriculum of that particular school, as well as the other issue that creates “a new dy­namic in the classroom” for Holton teachers — the differences in edu­cational systems.

“We’re getting kids from coun­tries where the educational system is completely different,” she said. “Some of them come with little to no science background, so when they end up in a science classroom at the middle school, they don’t have the foundations to learn, even with a translator present.”

The other part of Evans’ mission trip, she said, involves studying the culture and the “living situation” in Guatemala. She hopes to glean in­sights from her observations that “might help when it comes to finding out what motivates these students and getting to know them and building rapport with them,” she said.

Building that rapport, she added, is an important aspect of keeping ESL students involved in the classroom and the school system, as well as fostering a desire within them to further their education after high school. It’s also important, she said, to know what brings them from Guatemala to Holton in building that rapport.

“The majority of them are re­lated in some way to somebody else who’s already been here,” Evans said. “We have a lot of families and friends of families who have been here for a few years.”

There are also families from Spanish-speaking nations such as Mexico who settle in Holton for similar reasons, and Stones noted that it is important to reach out to them and make them feel welcome in an atmosphere where English is the predominantly spoken lan­guage.

“It’s tough, and it poses a lot of issues for the young people,” he said. “But we’re making progress. It’s worked out fairly well.”

Whether a school district has 28 ESL students, as Holton has this year, or no ESL students, which is the situation with Jackson Heights and Royal Valley this year, admin­istrators still stress the importance of being prepared to teach students who speak a language different from the rest of the student body.

Walsh said she learned that while working as a teacher in the Emporia school district.

“What I basically learned in the end was that it’s just good teaching strategy in working with the stu­dents,” Walsh said. “I believe that’s what teachers are doing when they have those students in class… In Emporia, we were teaching kids straight from Mexico.”

The experience also served Walsh well during her three years as an elementary principal in Syra­cuse, a town that she estimated had “about 40 percent ESL population” while she was there. Later, in her first year as an elementary principal at Jackson Heights, that experience would come into play again with the presence of a Spanish-speaking family in the district.

“At the time, our Spanish teach­ers were a big help as far as pro­viding vocabulary assistance or anything else that was needed,” she said. “That particular family had some very capable students. They just needed the material to be a lit­tle more concrete.”

All three school districts in Jack­son County have a number of ESL-certified teachers, and their training includes “the knowledge of how to reach the ESL kids,” Evans said. It’s also helpful when the teachers have at least a working knowledge of the language of students who are still learning English, she added.

“We have a para at the high school who speaks Spanish, and that’s been very helpful in relaying information to the kids to help them understand the concepts so they can do the work,” Evans said. “We have some ESL paras that help in the classrooms with the kids, as far as helping to modify the work for them, and working with them indi­vidually.”

Evans also said she wants to see the ESL curriculum expanding further into the community at large, and Evangel United Methodist Church in Holton has been a big help in that respect.

“EUM has a tutoring program that helps out the kids in our com­munity, and we’re working to ex­pand that into adult classes in the evening,” she said.