Princeton Schools Chief Recommends Overhaul Of Community Park Spanish Program

PRINCETON, NJ — Community Park School would drop its dual language immersion program in favor of a “Spanish-intensive” model under a plan Princeton Superintendent Mike LaSusa presented to the Board of Education on Tuesday.

Under the proposal, students at Community Park, known as CP, would learn math and science in English. Every student would get 45 minutes of explicit Spanish instruction a day, up from 30 minutes now. CP would also stop being an opt-in magnet school and become a neighborhood school, like the district’s other three elementary schools.

The board is scheduled to vote on the plan Nov. 17.

“I am recommending that we reimagine CP as a language-intensive school and transition from what we’ve been calling a DLI program, even though we’re not meeting the threshold of 50/50 language, into a Spanish-intensive program,” LaSusa said.

LaSusa said he considered phasing the program out over five years, but he is not recommending that.

“What I’m proposing, as opposed to ending the program, is to envision CP as an intensive Spanish program where there is explicit Spanish instruction happening every single day for 45 minutes,” he said.

LaSusa began with his own story. He said studying abroad in Seville, Spain, as a college sophomore changed the course of his life. He later started his teaching career in a bilingual middle school in North Philadelphia. His two children went to a Mandarin immersion preschool, and both graduated from high school with a seal of biliteracy.

“I want everyone to understand that I know what it is and what it means to be a teacher of language, and I know what it is to be a teacher of language in a bilingual program,” he said.

He praised CP’s staff throughout the presentation.

“I’ve never interacted with a more professional, caring, knowledgeable set of teachers than the teachers at CP,” he said. “And if I could go back in time, and my kids were this big again, in one second, I’d put them in CP.”

Concerns from parents and teachers

LaSusa said the recommendation came out of more than a year of meetings, surveys and data review.

Parents raised concerns about class sizes and staffing they saw as unfair compared with other schools, about academic supports, and about uneven support from the district, he said. Some parents told him that if their child struggled in the program, the child might have to switch schools and leave friends behind.

Teachers described an “inequitable and unsustainable” workload, according to the presentation. They also said it felt like “building the plane while flying.” LaSusa said teachers told him they were teaching twice as many students as teachers in other buildings and holding more parent conferences, all while coordinating with a partner teacher.

The district tried to ease class sizes this year. It used to admit 44 students through the lottery and split them into two sections. This year it admitted 45 and split them into three sections in kindergarten and first grade, about 15 students each.

LaSusa said there has been confusion about how the program was designed.

The Center for Applied Linguistics defines a dual language program as one where the partner language is used for at least 50 percent of instruction. Princeton’s 2014 program plan called for a “one-way” program, with about half of the core academic subjects taught in Spanish.

“We’re not operating a two-way program,” LaSusa said. “We’re operating a one-way program for the acquisition of Spanish, because we don’t have enough Spanish dominant students in the school to even consider a two-way program, and we never have.”

Today, CP students spend about 122.5 minutes a day in Spanish and 202.5 minutes in English, according to the presentation. That works out to less than 38 percent Spanish.

“You can see the language allocation is nowhere near 50-50,” he said.

Math is the largest Spanish block of the day. But LaSusa said teachers sometimes reteach math lessons in English, and the district’s supplemental math program, iReady, is in English.

“The teachers are doing that because they believe that’s what the kids need to understand the mathematics,” he said. “I’m not laying blame on anyone. It’s perfectly reasonable and understandable.”

Demographic shifts

The 2014 plan hoped the program would help multilingual learners, Black students, low-income students and students with disabilities. Since 2015-16, those groups have shrunk as a share of CP’s students, according to the presentation:

• English language learners: from 10 percent to 5.1 percent
• Special education students: from 16.8 percent to 10.3 percent
• Low-income students: from 20.9 percent to 16.8 percent
• Black students: from 6.7 percent to 4.1 percent

CP is now the only majority-white elementary school in the district, at 51 percent. It also has the district’s largest Hispanic population, at 28 percent. LaSusa called that progress, saying that years ago many Hispanic families in the neighborhood were opting out of CP.

“There are lots of reasons for this. It’s no one’s fault,” he said of the other shifts. “This was never the intention.”

He said that because CP has fewer special education students, more of them are being placed at other schools, mainly Johnson Park.

Test Scores & Math

LaSusa pushed back on the idea that the review was driven by test scores.

“There’s kind of this narrative out there among some people that the whole reason for this presentation is that the test scores are terrible,” he said. “That’s not true.”

He said general education students at CP score about the same as students at the other elementary schools in English language arts and slightly lower in math.

His bigger concern was multilingual learners. Of the 29 multilingual learners tested at CP over three years, 25 were from low-income families. At Littlebrook and Riverside, fewer than 10 of the multilingual learners tested were low-income. Several teachers told him those students were struggling to learn math in Spanish, and the scores backed that up, he said.

“I believe that most kids can do just fine having math take place in Spanish,” he said. “For some of our students, that might not be fine.”

Fewer Students Stick With Spanish

Each cohort starts with 40 to 45 first graders and shrinks to about 25 by high school, mostly because families move away, according to the presentation. Students who move to Princeton after first grade can’t join the program.

Of the 25 students in the program’s first cohort, now seniors, only eight are still taking Spanish. Among juniors, 14 of 25 are. LaSusa said many students run out of advanced courses after AP Spanish and a Spanish-language film course.

“We’re expending a lot of energy and resources, and we’re retaining not enough kids by the end of the line for my liking,” he said.

A district survey in April drew 192 responses from parents.

According to the survey results:

• 90.1 percent of parents agreed teachers provide a warm and welcoming environment.
• 82.7 percent agreed teachers communicate in a timely and professional way.
• 70.6 percent agreed district programming meets their child’s learning needs. Among parents of special education students, that dropped to 36.3 percent.
• Math and Spanish language arts were the most common concerns in written feedback.

The district also surveyed 27 staff members, including every classroom teacher at CP. All of them agreed CP is a caring and welcoming place. But LaSusa said many teachers questioned how long the program could keep going as it is.

LaSusa said the proposal is not about busing costs, though he addressed them.

Transportation costs have risen 82 percent over the past five years, while the district’s operating budget has grown 21 percent, according to the presentation. One bus route costs about $90,000 a year.

“Transportation is killing us,” he said.

About 160 students are bused out of the CP neighborhood to other schools, and about 65 are bused in, he said.

“It’s a neighborhood school, just like we’re trying to pretend that CP is a neighborhood school right now when it really isn’t,” he said.

What Would Change

Under the plan:

• Math and science would be taught in English.
• Spanish language arts would grow from 30 to 45 minutes a day.
• The daily “switch” between partner teachers would end, and each teacher would keep one class, like teachers at other schools.
• Specials would drop from 50 to 45 minutes, and the science/social studies block from 45 to 40 minutes.

LaSusa said CP students would get about 788 hours of Spanish from kindergarten through fifth grade, compared with about 210 hours at the other elementary schools, which offer two 30-minute classes a week.

“CP kids under this model would get four times as much language instruction as anyone else in the district,” he said.

He admitted that cutting minutes from other subjects is a tradeoff. “Our science and social studies supervisors think we need more time, not less,” he said.

The district would keep its middle school Spanish program and add at least one advanced Spanish course at Princeton High School. Students now attending other elementary schools would not be moved back to CP, and their younger siblings could attend the same school.

Hiring Challenges

The plan would likely require hiring two teachers certified in Spanish. LaSusa said those teachers are hard to find.

When a CP kindergarten teacher retired last year, the district had no qualified candidates for months, he said. It offered more than $100,000 to a teacher from another district, who turned the job down. The position was filled only in the last week of June.

LaSusa also wants to explore a coordinator position for the Spanish program at CP.

According to the presentation’s timeline, meetings with staff and parents were set to start the week of Oct. 26. Curriculum would be written from January through August, materials bought by June, and new staff hired from February through June.

Principal: ‘Our Story Isn’t Over’

CP Principal Dineen Gruchacz has led the school since the program launched in 2015. She spoke after LaSusa.

“No one is more enthralled with languages than me,” she said. “As many have heard over the years, I raised my hand to take this on in 2013. We planned for two years to be able to launch in 2015.”

She thanked LaSusa for taking the time to understand the program and asked families to support the change.

“Leadership asks us to evolve and to evaluate. Let us honor the work that has brought us here and support the direction that lies ahead,” she said.

“Supporting this decision does not diminish our pride in dual language, nor does it diminish the extraordinary work we’ve done so far,” she added. “Both of these things can be true. We can honor what this program has meant to our community and recognize that it may be time to move in a new direction.”

“Our story isn’t over,” she said.

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