Rosalia Saenz, a first grade bilingual teacher at Ramirez Thomas Elementary School, works last month with Ilithya Garcia, 7. A report says the city’s Spanish-speaking population is expected to continue to rise as it has in recent decades.
Carlos De La Paz, 7, ties his shoes last month before going to recess from Karla Rodriguez Romero's second grade bilingual class at Ramirez Thomas Elementary School.
Rosalia Saenz, a first grade bilingual teacher at Ramirez Thomas Elementary School, works last month with Ilithya Garcia, 7. A report says the city’s Spanish-speaking population is expected to continue to rise as it has in recent decades.
Carlos De La Paz, 7, ties his shoes last month before going to recess from Karla Rodriguez Romero's second grade bilingual class at Ramirez Thomas Elementary School.
First graders in Rosalia Saenz’s bilingual classroom at Ramirez Thomas Elementary School planned out the pages of a writing project con los deditos — on their fingers — and then got to work illustrating stories about their holiday traditions.
They spoke, largely in Spanish, of hotly anticipated Christmas gifts and tamales on that morning in mid-December.
This kind of bilingual education places value on students’ home language and culture while preparing them to achieve in English, Ramirez Thomas Principal Loretta Booker said.
The need for bilingual education in local schools is likely to increase. A new report from the Santa Fe Data Platform, a public-private data project, indicates a third of residents, or about 35,000 people, in the Santa Fe school district speak Spanish, a number expected to rise 10% by 2030 to 40,000 people — a trend consistent with steady growth in the city’s Spanish-speaking population in the past 30 years.
The New Mexican
The data platform’s findings “highlight the need for bilingual education and access to information in both English and Spanish,” the report states.
The news comes as state data shows proficiency rates in core subjects for English learners in the district — some of whom speak languages other than Spanish — remain among the lowest. Even before the coronavirus pandemic led to steep learning losses from more than two years of education disruptions, English learners achieved at far lower rates than other student groups, both in Santa Fe Public Schools and statewide.
The report also coincides with the start of the Santa Fe district’s so-called reimagining process, an effort to examine the use of school campuses as facilities age and student populations decline. Discussions by a steering committee leading the effort have pondered the possibility of repurposing building space to expand access to bilingual programs.
Santa Fe Public Schools has been investing state funds to bolster its bilingual programs. Superintendent Hilario “Larry” Chavez said told the school board in May it had requested $2.29 million for fiscal year 2023, which documents show was later allocated to 10 schools.
The district also has worked to recruit staff certified to teach English learners. It used federal COVID-19 relief funds to pay for teachers to earn the certification, Chavez said, and has since filled all of its bilingual positions.
Rosalia Saenz, a first grade bilingual teacher at Ramirez Thomas Elementary School, works with her students last month.
New Mexico has a long history of bilingual education, with enactment of the Bilingual Multicultural Education Act in 1973. The law encourages bilingualism and provides funding to support programs — for instance, the $2.29 million Santa Fe Public Schools received for the current school year came from this funding stream.
“Bilingual education” is an umbrella term for various types of programs to support students learning two languages, said Elisabeth Valenzuela, executive director of the New Mexico Association for Bilingual Education, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit.
The two most common types of bilingual education — and the two Santa Fe Public Schools employs — are the heritage model, designed to honor a student’s native language and culture while preparing them for English, and the dual-language model that aims to balance two languages while teaching academic content, Valenzuela said.
Both models can involve learning concepts in languages other than English and switching between languages in the classroom.
Ramirez Thomas Elementary, for instance, uses the heritage model, building students’ English proficiency in prekindergarten through second grade and switching students into all-English classrooms in third grade.
Fifty years after the Bilingual Multicultural Education Act took effect, challenges remain in funding and delivering bilingual education to the state’s public schools. A 2022 evaluation by the Legislative Finance Committee found most students participating in bilingual and multicultural programs are not becoming bilingual and biliterate or meeting standard academic benchmarks.
Valenzuela identified three major issues:
Curricula and assessments used to create and evaluate bilingual programs are often not designed for bilingual and biliterate students.
Training and hiring bilingual teachers can be difficult.
Districts can use funding from the Bilingual Multicultural Education Act for purposes other than direct support for bilingual programs.
As a bilingual teacher, Valenzuela said, she often received curricula written in English but expected to be taught in Spanish. Translating the curriculum while building a culturally relevant learning environment created a cultural and linguistic mismatch, an additional challenge for often-overwhelmed teachers.
Statewide assessments, too, are written and completed in English, Valenzuela said. This means the assessments might not be providing an accurate picture of academic achievement for bilingual students.
Michael Rodríguez, executive director of Dual Language Education of New Mexico, an organization that supports and develops dual-language programs, made a similar comment: “The thing with education is it’s very English-centric, not just in this state but across our country,” he said. “Our measures that are looked at more closely by the public are English assessments.”
New Mexico’s challenges in recent years in recruiting and retaining teachers extends to bilingual educators. A 2022 New Mexico State University report on teacher vacancies indicated 6% of the empty positions — or 40 jobs — included “bilingual” in the title.
The state isn’t lacking in teachers with bilingual endorsements; it’s lacking in bilingual-endorsed teachers who want to teach bilingual and multicultural programs, the Legislative Finance Committee’s evaluation found. Only 20% of New Mexico’s more than 4,000 bilingual-endorsed teachers in the state currently teach such programs.
Some bilingual-endorsed teachers in the state cited the lack of centralized training and professional development materials as the reason they chose not to teach in a bilingual or multicultural education program, the committee report found.
Professional development for bilingual teachers — usually delivered in English and without reference to other cultures — often falls short, Valenzuela added.
“[There’s] not enough support in terms of professional development for our bilingual teachers,” she said. “What they’re getting is what everyone else is getting, so again we go back to this very monolingual, monocultural curriculum and professional development.”
Despite the challenges, Valenzuela noted the state’s decades-old dedication to bilingual education. According to the state Public Education Department, the Bilingual Multicultural Education Act made New Mexico the first state in the nation to prioritize bilingual education in statute.
That’s something to be proud of, Valenzuela said.
“When we look at New Mexico history, bilingual education is something that our communities — both our Indigenous [and] Hispanic, Chicano communities — have always advocated [for] as a cultural and linguistic right, as something that is important to our state,” she said.
Rosalia Saenz, a first grade bilingual teacher at Ramirez Thomas Elementary School, works last month with Perla Soriano, 8.
Bilingual programs for English learners at Santa Fe Public Schools vary by grade level and school. A few elementary schools, like Ramirez Thomas, offer bilingual classrooms and an hour of English development each day beyond the traditional curriculum, said Stephanie Nieto, executive director of the district’s Language and Culture Department. Other elementary schools use a model in which students receive 45 minutes of English development daily.
At middle schools and high schools, students receive English support in their language arts course or take an English development course in addition to a traditional language arts class, depending on their skill level, Nieto said.
Although the district’s summer programming this year included a three-week English crash course for students new to the United States, the district offers no dual-language programs in Santa Fe high schools, even for kids with little or no English language skills.
Nieto said she is proud of the work the district has done to create opportunities for students learning English.
“I don’t feel that there’s a lot of additional support that we need,” she said. “It’s just moving forward and utilizing what we have in order to make our program more consistent K-12.”
Rodríguez also credited the district’s efforts to educate English learners.
“Santa Fe has done a good job in terms of making it a priority and making it something that is sustainable,” he said, citing long-lasting dual-language programs in the district.
Rodríguez helped establish dual-language programs in the early 2000s, first as assistant principal of the old Agua Fría Elementary School — which was replaced by El Camino Real Academy — and then as principal of Salazar Elementary School. Both schools still have active dual-language programs.
‘Clear understanding’ of need for equity
Santa Fe school board member Kate Noble said it’s too early to determine whether the board’s reimagining process will lead to additional bilingual programs throughout the district, but she said the possibility — including the potential for a fully bilingual high school — came up three or four times at a steering committee meeting in November.
“Though it’s a little early to say how exactly it would connect to reimagining, what I can say is that it has come up a bunch already,” Noble said.
The steering committee’s interpretation of “educational equity” — defined as providing additional resources to student groups without structural privileges — encourages more help for students learning English.
“There was a clear understanding [at the November meeting] that it does mean we need to do more for those who don’t speak English because they don’t have the structural advantage of being in the primary language of the majority of people in the district,” Noble said.
Saenz, the first grade teacher at Ramirez Thomas, said education bolstering students’ academic skills in English and Spanish is valuable for both students and their families.
“Como me decía mi papá — que en paz descanse — una persona bilingüe vale por dos, no en cuestión monetaria sino en su cuestión personal,” she said: “As my father said — may he rest in peace — a bilingual person is worth two people, not in terms of monetary value but in terms of personal value.”
