Daniels Welcomes Immigrant Wave

Forty-five native Spanish speakers have immigrated here and entered seventh and eighth grade at John C. Daniels School just over the past four months — and are getting up to speed fast thanks to a schoolwide effort to focus on language skills as well as family needs.

The school’s K‑8 multilingual student population has grown to 50 percent, reported Principal Yesenia Perez.

Daniels, situated on Congress Avenue in the Hill, is a dual language school: Its K‑4 classes are taught in English and Spanish. Some 5th-8th grade core subjects like language arts and social studies are also taught in English and Spanish. That has made it a welcome spot for the children continuing to come to New Haven as part of a wave of immigration from Spanish-speaking countries.

This school year Daniels has reached its middle school student capacity as a large influx of fifth-through- eighth-grade native Spanish-speaking students have enrolled. Nearly all middle-grade levels have reached the 54-student capacity. The seventh grade is made up of 25 ​“multi-language learners” (MLL); the eighth grade has about 20 MLL students.

Perez said her goal is to prepare the students for high school, especially eighth graders who arrived this winter and have only just a few more months before moving on.

“They came here looking for better lives, so we have five to six months to provide them with enough English acquisition to advocate for themselves and pick their right high school classes,” she said.

The newcomer students bring rich culture, language, and experiences to the school, she said. ​“The Newcomer Students at JCD are eager to learn. They are attentive, communicative, and risk takers.”

The influx of MLL students has caused the school to develop a Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) instruction series for educators. It has established a newcomer class for students to temporarily attend and learn basic English words and phrases that will equip them to ask questions and self-advocate in other classes. The newcomer class focuses on developing oral English language skills and basic reading and writing skills. It also helps temporarily minimize full-capacity classrooms with large makeups of native Spanish speakers to support educators adjusting to instructional shifts.

School District Supervisor of English Language Learner Programs Rosalyn Díaz-Ortiz has pitched in by enrolling MLL students in Saturday academies. 

Literacy coach Heather O’Brien said the Daniels dual language programming has been helping students not just to learn English but to improve their native Spanish, which in turn has proven to help students learn English more effectively.

Daniels eighth-graders David Santiago Franco Chaparro, Deam Sebastian Barrozo Garzon, Widny Morel, Marlene Rosario, Iveth Shenoha Quintero Rodriguez, and Kenia Wama Vargas spoke with this reporter about their experiences at Daniels so far. 

Widny Morel immigrated to New Haven in August from the Dominican Republic. She said she has enjoyed how friendly Daniels staff and students have been to her since her arrival. She said so far this school year she’s felt more confident in her English speaking and proud of herself. 

She added that educators like Daniels seventh and eighth-grade Spanish Language Arts Teacher Aida Vales have supported her greatly. ​“She is love,” Morel said. 

Iveth Shenoha Quintero Rodriguez arrived in August from Colombia not knowing any English. She said now she gets the chance to learn every day from kind educators. ​“The teachers are very very good; it’s perfect. They make activities in Spanish and English to help when we don’t understand,” she said. Rodriguez added that it has been ​“so important to have a good friend to help you progress” and that’s been possible for her and other MLL’s because of the growing community at the school. 

Kenia Wama Vargas arrived at Daniels in November from Ecuador. She said when she first got here she didn’t have any friends and didn’t know the country. But from the school’s teachers and students she has made friends and has been able to learn so much. 

Deam Sebastian Barrozo Garzon immigrated from Ecuador in November. He said in the past he would play around a lot in school but now he’s learned to pay attention and stay focused on his learning.

Marlene Rosario came from the Dominican Republic with only her mom and sister. She didn’t know English or anyone but the family she came with. Because there are other MLLs at Daniels, she said, she has found people to relate to and help her when she struggles in her classes. 

“It is important to invest in this growing population, because these students assist their families as translators, support classmates and teachers, and sometimes even care for their younger siblings at home,” said Principal Perez. ​“At JCD we want our newcomers to excel as we see their determination and perseverance to learn and succeed.” 

Half of Daniels’ faculty is bilingual. O’Brien said the students also learn from teachers who speak only English, when they see their educators trying to learn a new language with them. 

This showed to be true in Brittany Bowdren’s eighth-grade English Language Arts classroom Monday. Bowdren does not speak Spanish fluently but from her students has learned classroom Spanish to support them as she teaches them language arts.

Bowdren said that in this work social emotional learning (SEL) support is ​“crucial because they’re arriving here overwhelmed with so many new things like a new language, school, and city.”

Earlier in the year Bowdren visited an English learners’ class at Wilbur Cross, where she picked up strategies like providing students with dictionary definitions for words rather than just using Google translate. She learned to teach students common sentence starters like ​“I have a question about” to help them to learn the meaning of frequently used word clusters.

She also noticed the Cross teacher spoke very little Spanish to her MLL students, introducing them to a English immersed classroom. Bowdren said she is working to pull away from speaking Spanish in her classroom now. At the start of the year she was speaking mostly Spanish to translate assignments to students. 

As Bowdren said words like ​“learn aloud” in class Monday, she pointed to her head and told the students, ​“Say it with me.” The students said ​“learn” in unison with Bowdren and then repeated the word back to her in Spanish (aprender) to confirm their comprehension. 

“The people,” Bowdren said, which was followed by the students repeating the English words. ​“La gente,” one student said afterwards and Bowdren gave them a thumbs up. Bowdren also tasked them with drawing pictures that represent each word in their notebooks.

In a work packet students repeated ​“this is” phrases while completing the sentence with phrases like ​“my best friend” or ​“the soccer field.” The students repeated the sentences aloud with Bowdren practicing their pronunciation and recognition of words. Bowdren helped the students by animating the sentences with movements like kicking the air when mentioning soccer.

“Your pronunciation is so good. I’m very proud of you,” Bowdren said.