Schools attracting Marshallese kids
One of the world’s smallest countries is having a dynamic impact on Spokane Public Schools.
Students from the Marshall Islands, halfway between Hawaii and Australia, are among the fastest growing non-English speaking populations in the school district.
As for translators, “Marshallese is our greatest need right now,” said Dottie Weldon, the district’s special programs coordinator.
Spokane County’s largest school district has been using a part-time translator to help serve the Marshallese, who are settling mainly in northeast Spokane, she said.
In the 2004-2005 school year, there were 47 Marshallese students. By late September, 11 more were enrolled.
“That population will continue to grow. We’re told more families are coming,” Weldon said.
Job opportunities are expected to draw hundreds more in the next several months, said local school officials.
“They want the education offered here. Education on the islands isn’t treated as seriously,” Weldon said. “Kids kind of go to school when they feel like it.”
Overall, immigrant student population numbers have begun leveling off for Spokane Public Schools. But those moving in are a more diverse group. Of 73 immigrant students who registered with the district since August, 13 were from Ukraine; 11 from the Marshall Islands; nine from Somalia; seven from Mexico and five from Cuba. Other countries represented include India, Singapore, Guam, Chile and Uzbekistan.
“We are way more diverse than we recognize,” Weldon said.
In 1989, there were 174 students classified as using English as a second language. Now there are almost 1,200 students at 33 elementary school, five middle schools and five high schools.
Last week a kindergarten teacher contacted Weldon regarding permission slips sent home for a field trip. The district has slips in six languages, but not in Arabic.
They ended up calling a student’s Arabic-speaking family directly to get permission.
“We get surprises like that once in a while,” Weldon said.
School forms are in the works for Arabic, Marshallese and Sudanese.
For years, Eastern Europeans formed the dominant immigrant group coming into the schools. But as more families have become established in Spokane, Russian families are following the Spokane County migration patterns and settling in the Mead and Spokane Valley districts, Weldon said.
In 2004-2005, 559 Russian students made up almost half of the English-learning population. As recently as five years ago, Eastern Europeans made up 75 percent of all English learners, she said.
The new populations present new challenges, Weldon said. Unlike the Eastern Europeans, who had extensive schooling in their first language, students from Sudan, Marshall Islands and Somalia come from countries with sporadic school systems.
In Somalia, most people get less than two years of education, Weldon said.
“They don’t have the cognitive academic language,” she said. “They probably will not graduate from our system.”
There’s talk that hundreds more Marshall Islands families – partly drawn by an established Marshallese church – are coming to Spokane, said Molly Popchock, who works with English learners at the Institute for Extended Learning, which is associated with Community Colleges of Spokane.
The Republic of Marshall Islands, named after British Naval Captain William Marshall in 1788, is comprised of a chain of atolls and islands that collectively equal the approximate size of Washington, D.C., according to CIA Web sites. The population as of July was 59,071.
Bikini Island, probably the most well known of the Marshall Islands, is a former U.S. nuclear test site.