How Baywood’s first bilingual class navigated a pandemic to find their superpower | Opinion

Every year, Baywood Elementary School’s fifth-graders complete a legacy project — an art piece in whatever medium suits the students and families, from fiber and sculpture to watercolor and tile. It’s something handmade and permanent, left behind for every student who comes after them. It’s a way of saying: we were here.

The prompt for this year’s legacy project was simple: Imagine that your school-self and your home-self are two different creatures. How are they different, and why do they represent you? Now, mash them up to make something entirely new that still represents who you are.

This art form is called alebrijes. Originating in Mexican folk art, alebrijes are astonishing creatures assembled from mismatched animal parts: the wings of one thing, the legs of another, the feathers, fur, or scales of the natural world depicted with fantastical, otherworldly colors. For this class, the parallel could not be more fitting or more hard-won.

For the fifth-graders at Baywood Elementary in Los Osos, that assignment was a summary of their young lives. As the inaugural class of Baywood’s Dual-Language Immersion (DLI) program, these students have been living a double life since kindergarten: while English swirls around them off-campus, academic Spanish is the modus operandi in the classroom.

This class spent six years moving between two languages, two ways of thinking, two ways of being, with English instruction gradually increasing until it reached 50/50 with Spanish. Now, as they prepare to enter middle school, they are doing what their program always intended: combining parts that don’t necessarily fit together into something new and magical.

A global pandemic interrupts inaugural class

When Baywood started this program in fall 2020, the timing couldn’t have been worse. The San Luis Coastal Unified School District Board of Trustees had voted the previous September to offer coastal students an education in two languages. What the district could not have planned for was a global pandemic.

Baywood’s inaugural kindergarteners met their teachers (and each other) through screens on the first day of school. Children who had never had a formal Spanish lesson in their lives were learning to count, to recite letter sounds and to sing songs, all while using a laptop, possibly for the first time.

Sometimes, a younger sibling appeared on camera. Jessie Gade, a fifth-grade teacher at Baywood who is now facilitating the class’ alebrije legacy project, recalls “meeting” one of her current fifth-graders when they popped up on screen while Gade was teaching their older sibling.

That type of full-circle moment hasn’t been lost on parents, either.

“My son was part of the very first class, so their experience was uniquely challenging,” said Briana French Jones, a parent who is co-leading the legacy project. “But the program found its footing ... and the cognitive and academic benefits of language immersion have been remarkable.”

In the classroom, new hurdles await

The transition to in-person learning also brought hurdles. Returning to school after a disrupted 18 months, this class arrived to first grade carrying the weight of a suboptimal kindergarten foundation.

Virginia Duazo, “Maestra” to her students, navigated remote learning herself with this very class and has remained at Baywood for every kindergarten class since.

“On Zoom, when learning was the most difficult, I heard students sing songs like “Paz y Libertad” (Peace and Freedom). Then, two years later, a student came up to me and started conversing in Spanish without any prompting, and now, as fifth graders, I watch them perform and lead school assemblies in both languages,” Duazo said.

The harder years, though, were still ahead.

Behavioral challenges surfaced, and academic gaps appeared. The DLI program itself was still finding its way through planned and unplanned staff turnover and several leadership changes before Principal Kirstin May arrived in 2022 and stayed.

Under May’s leadership, seasoned teachers spearheaded a build-out of Spanish literacy resources, while new systems began tracking data on how the program was functioning for each individual student. Slowly, growth began and quickened. Students on watch became stable readers. They began to show that concepts taught in one language would show up in students’ use of their other language — a key component of DLI.

For parents, there was a learning curve too, with challenges often giving way to a glimpse of how their child was starting to view the world and their place in it differently, in big ways and small. Amy Shimer, a Baywood parent, once shared at a DLI meeting that her otherwise introverted son — in second grade at the time — would insist on ordering for the whole family when they got Mexican takeout, but declined if he had to order in English.

Baywood students can switch between languages mid-sentence, not to show off, but because both languages live in the same brain, sometimes competing for the same moment of expression. They understand jokes in Spanish, which any language learner will tell you is a real milestone. They dream in two languages. They can enter a room and know, instinctively, which language belongs there.

The growth, while incremental, eventually happened because students were given the time, consistency, and instructors who believed in what the research has long confirmed — that young brains are wired for language and that, given the right conditions, they will do remarkable things with it.

They were building their alebrijes without knowing it, assembling something new from mismatched parts.

In early June, Baywood’s first DLI class will walk across a stage at their promotion ceremony.

On the walls of Baywood, their alebrijes will remain on display near the legacy projects that came before them. Each alebrije will be a small portrait of a child who contains multitudes, assembled into a mosaic that is the story of the first DLI class.

The parts that don’t quite match up, somehow become something magical together.

That is their legacy.

Erik Gomez is the parent of a Baywood Elementary School student. He wrote this with support from Baywood Elementary Principal Kirstin May.