Need help for Spanish speaking girl’s education options while learning English

I’m asking for my friends who moved to the US less than a year ago. They have two small children, a boy in 2nd grade and a girl in 3rd who are currently going to the local public school. They’re suddenly having to learn in an all English-speaking school, so naturally they’re facing some issues.

I’m concerned about both of these children, but the girl is more sensitive than the boy so she’s having a pretty terrible time. The teachers are yelling at her. The teachers aides are yelling at her. And when their mom went to talk to the principal et al about this, they denied any mistreatment, and basically stonewalled her after telling her that if her daughter doesn’t shape up she’ll be left back.

It’s as if these educators don’t get the simple fact that this little girl does not understand very much English yet & needs help, not reprimanding. And they treat her so poorly that she comes home crying and pleading with her mother not to make her go back to the school. Her mom is teaching her English at home but it’s not some kind of magic trick that happens instantaneously, especially since her mom is also learning English at the same time.

She’s very well behaved but they treat her like some kind of a troublemaker just because she doesn’t understand the language. This is just crazy to me.

I found that there is a program in 3 of the public schools in our town called Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) where students learn English while they’re studying the curriculum in Spanish. So basically, the kids have an opportunity to learn the appropriate curriculum & maintain their grade level while they’re learning English, all under one roof. Then ultimately they transition into fluent English speakers at which point the language barrier to education is no longer an issue.

The problem is that the public schools in our district are ranked very low, bottom 17th percentile I think I read, and also these 3 schools are in pretty rough neighborhoods. So even though the concept of TBE sounds perfect, the prospect overall is far from ideal.

I don’t think homeschooling would work well because her parents speak Spanish in the house and are also learning English themselves, so the kids aren’t exposed to very much English outside of school.

Private school doesn’t seem to be an option for them because of finances, but I haven’t looked into scholarships or other programs that might be available, so there’s a possibility that with financial aid she could get into a private school. But even then the odds of finding a private school where she could learn in Spanish, but study English at the same time seems pretty far flung, even though there is a large Latino population in our city.

So I’m here to hopefully get some more ideas from you folks. I am not experienced at this kind of thing. I don’t have children myself and I’ve never given much thought to how a child could make a transition like this. I don’t know anything about how charter schools work or what other options might be available. Any info you could share that would help me help them is much appreciated.

Submitted October 10, 2024 at 04:52AM by PicklesFreckles https://ift.tt/fHTB70w