Parents of students in JCPS Spanish classes are unsure about their children’s future in the district.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) – As thousands of families prepare to decide which Jefferson County school to send their children to, a group of parents involved in the district’s Spanish language program say they’re unsure what their future might look like. children.

This comes after JCPS decided in September to cut the Spanish course at Highland High School due to lack of funding and enrollment. As a solution, JCPS began offering online classes to students to compensate.

In a statement to WAVE News, JCPS said the teacher in charge of the class assured parents “will be very pleased with their child’s growth.”

But parents like Laura Moyer, whose son is an eighth-grader at Highland Middle, say that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Doing worksheets and making them go back and look at ABCs and numbers seems downright insulting,” she said. “He feels like he’s been let down by the school, by the neighborhood.”

Moyer’s son was in the Spanish immersion program at Hawthorne Elementary School for six years. She added that it was important to their family for him to have this experience.

“We are a family that believes the world is a big place and we all have a part in it,” she explained. “And we thought that in this world where Spanish is taking center stage, we would honestly be doing our child a disservice if we didn’t take advantage of this opportunity.”

Highland High School previously offered advanced Spanish courses that paired students in the Spanish immersion program at Hawthorne Elementary with those who transferred to Atherton Middle School.

Dr. Laura Escobar-Ratliff, president of the Parent Teacher Student Association (PTSA) at Highland High School and the parent of another Spanish student at the school, said canceling the course created a gap. JCPS has already decided to cut Highland Middle’s Spanish immersion program in 2022.

Escobar-Ratliff mentioned that a group of parents tried to convince JCPS to reinstate the class.

“We were slowed down throughout the entire process,” she added. “We’ve been in school board meetings, sent emails, made phone calls and gotten the same general response as opposed to having a substantive conversation.”

The group came up with potential solutions to the problem, Escobar-Ratliff said. One such solution involves building partnerships with communities and corporations.

“There are a lot of corporations, businesses and organizations that would like to see this continue,” she explained. “We just need to make those connections, and we’re happy to help with that work and build those connections and make the case for it.”

Escobar-Ratliff said money should not be a reason to end the program.

“The average cost of a teacher is $75,000 to $76,000,” she noted. “Tell me we can’t figure this out to support such an important program that impacts the trajectory from sixth to eighth grade from success in elementary school to success in high school while continuing that path. These are pennies in the overall budget. We can do better and we want to help the county, but they need to meet with us.”

For some parents, like Leslie Rodriguez, the opportunity to attend Highland influenced their decision about which school their children would attend. In her case, she made sure to move to an area near Hawthorne Elementary School.

“My husband is Chilean, so my children are half Chilean,” she noted. “It’s very important to us to keep Latino culture in their lives, and learning Spanish is obviously a huge part of that, so we wanted them to grow up in this environment where the Spanish language is celebrated and accepted.”

Now, with the future of Hispanic students uncertain and the clock ticking on decisions, Rodriguez said she may no longer have the incentive to come to Highland Middle.

“I’m going to start shopping and looking for other places,” she added.

It’s a sentiment Moyer knows all too well.

“It’s difficult for us to get into this process of evaluating high school options and really trust that what the school says it is investing in and will have will still be there,” she commented. “It is not too late for the district to correct this mistake.”

In a statement to WAVE News, JCPS said restoring in-person Spanish instruction and electives for students at Highland or elsewhere is “simply not possible this year.” They said decisions on class sizes for all schools next year will be made in the spring.

Copyright 2024. WAVE. All rights reserved.