Editor's Note: This is the 15th in a 17-part series that features a program at each of Garden City's 17 public schools. Today's story focuses on daily Spanish lessons at Pierceville-Plymell Elementary School.

Pierceville-Plymell Video

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By EMILY BEHLMANN

ebehlmann@gctelegram.com

Standing in front of a classroom on Friday, Betsy Lobmeyer led her first-year Spanish students in counting "uno" to "diez."

It's a lesson she might have given to freshmen at Garden City High School when she used to teach there, but this time, she was working with kindergartners at Pierceville-Plymell Elementary School.

The students there can do a lot more than just count in Spanish, even though most are native English speakers, according to Lobmeyer.

With three years' worth of 30-minute daily Spanish lessons, many of the school's older students can converse with native speakers in full sentences, expressing things like what they like and don't like and what they want to do, she said. Her third- and fourth-graders even can read an article from a college text and answer questions about it -- all in Spanish.

"And they can understand an incredible amount," she said.

Pierceville-Plymell implemented the daily Spanish classes for all its students in the 2005-06 school year, following encouragement from former Superintendent Jim Lentz and former Deputy Superintendent Julie Ford, according to Pierceville-Plymell Principal Martha Darter.

Part of the motivation was that school leaders saw a need for children to be bilingual when they grow up and enter the workforce, she said.

"It needs to be in elementary schools," she said. "These kids are like sponges."

When Pierceville-Plymell found Lobmeyer, a high school Spanish teacher who wanted to switch to a half-time elementary job, the program took off, Darter said.

Lobmeyer said the class is intended to be a "mini immersion experience." She does limited translation into English at the start of kindergarten, but otherwise speaks almost entirely in Spanish.

"At the beginning, there's a little fear, but for kids, that goes away fast," she said.

She said they "forget they don't know what you're saying," and their vocabulary builds until they often do know a lot of what she's saying. It's almost easier for young children, who "just jump in and experience the language," than it is for high school students with their minds on many other things, Lobmeyer said.

She said she sees many benefits to teaching Spanish at the elementary level, besides just potential to help in the workforce.

The knowledge helps them communicate in a community where many people are bilingual or speak only Spanish, and allows them to talk to new students at the school whose English skills are weak, she said.

"It tears down these barriers we have," she said.

The process of learning a second language also helps children's education, Lobmeyer said. Learning a language forces someone to think analytically and to make connections in the brain, which supports learning of one's native language, she said.

She uses research to back up her point in a message sent to parents. A 2006 report from the Center for Applied Linguistics, for instance, found that learning a second language at the pre-kindergarten-to-eighth-grade level has benefits like enhancing a child's mental development and providing them with "more flexibility in thinking, greater sensitivity to language and a better ear for listening."

Darter said the time students spend in Spanish class is time other USD 457 students would spend with a writing teacher. She doesn't think they miss out on writing skills, though, because teachers are urged to include writing in all subject areas, including Spanish, she said.

As Pierceville-Plymell starts on its fourth year of Spanish classes next year, it will do so with a new grade level. The school, along with Jennie Barker Elementary School, added fifth grade this school year and will add sixth grade next school year, largely to balance enrollment in the district.

Darter said Spanish classes at the older grades might start to incorporate more grammar, but that the plans still are being developed.

Lobmeyer, meanwhile, said she's excited about the potential for students like the kindergartners she taught this morning.

If the school maintains the program, they'll have seven years' worth of daily Spanish class by the time they hit middle school.