Class Acts: Saturday classes link students to their heritage  

Immigrants can lose their cultural and linguistic ties to their native lands if they don’t make a concerted effort to preserve those bonds in their new homes, but a unique program of Saturday classes at the Folsom Cordova Unified School District helps Ukrainian, Russian, Armenian and Spanish-speaking students keep connected to their roots. Officials say the program bolsters student achievement by improving vocabulary and reading levels, using native languages as a starting point.

One of the unique aspects of the program is that it was established by immigrant parents, then later supported and expanded by the district.

“The surprising and unusual and heartwarming part of this project is it was developed by the community … with the school district coming in later to support it,” says Judy Lewis, the former director of state and federal programs for Folsom Cordova USD, who helped develop the link between the school district and the program.

The Community Heritage Language Program got its start in 1992, when Ukrainian religious refugees began offering language and cultural instruction to the children of their community in a local church. About a year after the program began, officials with the school district became aware of it and recognized its value; they offered to provide classroom space and some instructional materials.

The Ukrainian model expanded, and soon Russian and Armenian schools cropped up, as did a Spanish-language school. Now, some 600 students meet 32 Saturdays a year to learn to read and write in their native language and to learn about the culture of their forebears.

“It’s a very highly-paced, high-standards program,” says Lewis.

Each level has weekly lesson plans with accompanying assessments. The classes meet for four hours. Students have homework nearly every week, and parents are asked to ensure that it gets done, giving them a role in their children’s education and a connection with their schools. Some parents also gather and socialize while the students are in class, giving district staff a chance to provide them with information about their children’s schools. The program earned Folsom Cordova USD a CSBA Golden Bell Award for parental and community involvement in 2007.

Lewis says that the school district has seen standardized test scores rise for many of the students who participate. Program instructors work with the district to link some of their lessons with state standards. For instance, terms used in the eighth-level Ukrainian literature selections, such as plot, character and personification, also are concepts that the state requires all students to master; reading selections in the second-level Ukrainian reading program align with California third-grade science standards.

For recently arrived immigrants who speak limited English, instruction in the Community Heritage Language Program is offered in both English and the native tongue, with a focus on the most frequently used vocabulary words in California schools. Beginning readers learn words in their primary language that are translations of high-frequency words they encounter in English.

Test data from 2006 showed that 22 percent of the students who attended the Saturday heritage classes for native Spanish speakers improved one or more levels on state tests, compared with 7 percent of students who did not take the classes.

As another benefit of the program, students can apply it to their high school foreign language requirements. District officials have received queries from educators in other states looking to replicate the program.

Most of the funds have come from the Refugee Student Assistance Program administered through California’s Department of Education and Department of Social Services. Parents also pay a fee for the classes—raising a total of around $50,000 per year—and the district provides matching grants.

“The parents spoke with their wallets,” signaling the value they place in the program, Lewis says.

Students do not need to be residents of the district to attend the Saturday classes. One boy has traveled to Folsom from Modesto, more than an hour south, every weekend that the classes are in session for the past eight years, Lewis notes.

Parents support the program because it not only preserves their children’s roots with their native country, but the language instruction also increases the children’s employment prospects.

“It allows the kids to develop the skills needed in a global economy,” says Lewis.

—Pamela Martineau