Dual language immersion teacher Saul Rodriguez motions and gestures while speaking Spanish during class with kindergarteners and 1st-graders on Tuesday morning at Park Elementary School in Casper. (Dan Cepeda, Star-Tribune)
A smiling Saul Rodriguez, 33, greeted Spencer Mosley on Tuesday morning outside his classroom at Park Elementary School.
In halting Spanish, Mosley, the school's counselor, asked Rodriguez what students should call him -- Mr. Rodriguez? Senor? Then he introduced his son, Luke, who stood at his side.
"You can say hello; just remember he only speaks in Spanish," Mosley told Luke. "Can you say, 'Hola?'"
"Hola," Luke said, shaking Rodriguez's hand.
Outside, nervous parents hovered around equally nervous kindergartners. Some filmed and photographed their children on iPhones. Many followed their kids through the building as Rodriguez and his partner teacher, Nicole Dundas, 31, hustled children onto a carpet and opened a book written in Spanish and English. A few parents cried.
For Park, Tuesday wasn't an ordinary first day of school. It also meant the first day for the school's new Spanish dual-language immersion program, where some kindergartners and first-graders will learn in English half the day and in Spanish the other half. The school received $15,000 from the Wyoming Department of Education to help start the program this year. It is the second dual-language program in Casper.
Rodriguez, the Spanish instructor, arrived in Casper from his native Spain three days ago.
The cars here are big, he said. And the streets are wide open.
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Like many elementary students' first days of school, more time was spent on classroom housekeeping -- like sorting school supplies and learning to sit still -- than on reading, writing or arithmetic in Rodriguez's classroom Tuesday.
Dundas called directions in English to the multi-aged class. Rodriguez often repeated them in Spanish.
He spoke quiet Spanish once to a curly-haired blonde girl, whose open pencil box was still sitting on her table after her classmates' had been put away.
The girl looked up at him once eagerly, trying to comprehend his words.
Rodriguez repeated the Spanish word for pencil box -- "caja" -- and pointed to Dundas' desk, where the other pencil boxes were stored.
The girl looked down at her pencil box, back up at Rodriguez and nodded. She rose from her chair, clutching her box, and set it gently on the pile nearby.
Students will probably not understand much at first, said Dawn DeWald, the school's principal.
But come back to school tomorrow and you'll know more, she told Rodriguez's students as they toured the school Tuesday.
"By Christmas, more. And Valentine's Day, more," DeWald said. "Just keeping listening."
Park has a history of weaving Spanish into its school culture. The school employs another full-time traditional Spanish teacher and has offered about 90 minutes of Spanish instruction a week to all its students for more than a decade.
At Park, students recite the Pledge of Allegiance first in English then in Spanish each morning. International flags hang in one hallway. On a wall near the school's entrance, big block letters spelling "Bienvenido" and "Welcome" greet students. Some parts of the building are decorated with laminated Spanish words -- "la Oficina," for instance, hangs over the office door.
The dual language immersion program takes Spanish instruction to a new level. It immerses students in the language; they learn math and science in Spanish.
For Mindy and Brian McCarthy, the dual-language class is a chance to enhance children's natural cognitive abilities. Their daughter, Brynn, 5, is a student in Rodriguez's class this year.
"They're like little sponges at this age," Mindy McCarthy said. "We wanted to give her every opportunity to grow and explore."
The McCarthys don't speak Spanish at home.
"Just Dora the Explorer," Brian McCarthy said.
But they are looking forward to learning with their daughter, who they hope will teach her family what she learns in school each day, Mindy said.
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Nothing interrupted Rodriguez's happy calm on Tuesday.
Together, Rodriguez and Dundas fielded lost sweatshirts, finicky nametags, more than one lonely 5-year-old away from Mom and Dad for the first time and a playground bump that landed a girl in the nurse's office.
By the end of this week, the pair's schedule for the multi-aged classroom will return to normal. Half the group will spend the morning with Rodriguez, learning math and science entirely in Spanish, the other half with Dundas learning English literacy. In the afternoons, they will switch. Dundas will reinforce and supplement in English what Rodriguez teaches them in Spanish, she said.
At times Tuesday, the teachers struggled to communicate. Dundas speaks virtually no Spanish.
"I'll just have to learn," she said.
In the meantime, Rodriguez relies mostly on gestures and repetition to communicate with Dundas in front of the students.
Tuesday, it worked.
The two also devised a system to communicate in case of necessity; Rodriguez can write English phrases on a notepad kept on the ledge between his classroom and Dundas'. And in an emergency, of course, Rodriguez can speak in English, Dundas said.
"It's important [for students] to see him as speaking only in Spanish," said Dundas, who volunteered to teach with the dual-language immersion program this year and has a 4-year-old son she hopes will make the class next fall.
Students will work harder at learning the language that way, she said. If they don't know he speaks English, they are less likely to take the easy way out by responding in their native language.
Eventually, though, students will figure out that Rodriguez speaks English.
Dundas hopes that will help them see it is possible for them, too, to learn more than one language.
Soon, certain words will become familiar and begin to stick out from Rodriguez's lilting Spanish. What sounds like a verbal gush of water from an open spigot will slow down for the children. Their little brains will recognize words and phrases -- like "elefante," "Abuelo," "frijoles" -- within the flow of fast sentences. One day, they will craft Spanish sentences of their own.
But for now, Rodriguez doesn't pay any mind to the blank stares and slow reactions when he speaks in Spanish.
It's only the first day of school, after all.
One day down. One hundred and seventy-four to go.
