Contacting us
Our Bilingual staff speaks
Cambodian, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Spanish.
Bilingual Teachers
Primary: Edwyna Spiegel
252-8280 ecspiegel@seattleschools.org
Room 114
Intermediate: Priscilla
Schmidt 252-8289 ppschmidt@seattleschools.org
Upstairs Conf. Room
Bilingual Instructional Assistants
My Dang. Vietnamese. 252-8280 mhdang@seattleschools.org Room 114
Lucia Heredia. Spanish. 252-8306 luheredia@seattleschools.org Room 114
Susana Medina. Spanish. 252-8306 sumedina@seattleschools.org Room 114
|
Qualifying for Bilingual Services
Testing for our program is administered by the Bilingual Family
Center: Room 104 at Aki Kurose
Middle School, at 3928 South Graham Street. Their office hours are
8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, or call them at (206) 252-7750. With advance arrangement, testers can
come down to Highland Park and administer the eligibility test to your
student here.
Exiting the
Program
Every spring, students in our program take the WLPT, which
determines if they have achieved proficiency in reading and writing the
English Language and are ready to be in mainstream classrooms without
special English Language support.
For more help interpreting your child’s test scores, please visit OSPI’s
website on the topic.
|
What We Do
Approximately 25% of
Highland Park’s students qualify for English Language support, and many
others have exited our program after achieving English Language
proficiency. Of the 25%, more than
50 students speak Spanish, over 30 speak Vietnamese, approximately 13 speak
Cambodian, and the rest speak a variety of languages including but not
limited to Oromo, Amharic, Tagalog, Ilokano, Cantonese, Lao, Gujarati,
Somalian, Samoan, and Hmong.
Our department’s primary
responsibility is to provide English Language Development Instruction to
students who have a home language other than English. We also provide academic support to
English Language Learners who require additional support to be successful
in the regular classroom.
Our department also acts
as a liaison between the school and language minorities in our community,
providing interpretation and translation services, communicating with
parents still learning English, and advocating for their children within a
school system that is still new to many of them.
We celebrate our school’s
cultural diversity with two assemblies that are driven by our two largest
language minorities at Highland Park: a Lunar New Year celebration in
January/February, and a Cinco de Mayo celebration in May. Both of these assemblies bring families
of various cultural backgrounds into our schools and allow them to become
involved in our school community.
|
