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August 27, 2005

Bound Brook meets student needs with bigger bilingual staff
District hires several bilingual faculty staff members for its schools.


By GREG MARANO
Staff Writer

BOUND BROOK -- Teachers and faculty in the borough school district will be speaking a bit more Spanish in the upcoming school year.

To keep up with the needs of the growing Hispanic enrollment, the district has hired several bilingual faculty members, including a math teacher and a social studies teacher for Bound Brook Middle-Senior High School, a sixth-grade teacher for Smalley School, a psychologist and a social worker, district business administrator Carole Deddy said.

"We've never had as many bilingual teachers as we've just been able to recruit," Deddy said.

Deddy said the bilingual program will be administered differently this year, allowing more students with limited English proficiency to stay in classrooms with their English-speaking peers. Instead of instructing them in Spanish-only classrooms, she said, bilingual teachers will work with the students in regular classrooms.

"The math class (for example) will be taught in English, but the teacher can and will speak Spanish when he sees a student not grasping," Deddy said. "So it's a huge accomplishment to have been able to recruit as many bilingual teachers this year as we have."

Bilingual and English as a Second Language programs are offered at all schools in the district, Deddy said.

Deddy said the district is abandoning an early-level program in which first- and second-grade students are taught in Spanish. She said this program has proven ineffective, especially since these are students who were taught in English in preschool and kindergarten. Because they were responding well and learning English in preschool and kindergarten, this setup was actually a step back for these students when they got to first and second grades, Deddy said.

Instead, they will be in classrooms with English-speaking peers, with bilingual teachers coming into the classrooms to work with them when necessary, Deddy said.

There are about 1,600 students in the Bound Brook School District, including students from South Bound Brook who attend Bound Brook Middle-Senior High School. No number was available on how many students need bilingual services, but Deddy said the district will conduct a count in October.

In the 2000 U.S. Census, about 35 percent of Bound Brook's population was listed as Hispanic.