Londis Ramirez knew her plan was working when a preschooler making a self-portrait asked her, “Can you help me draw my panza?”
Panza means belly in Spanish, which is not the child’s first language. But a Head Start program tested last year and expanding this fall in Jefferson County is offering preschool in Spanish and English, one of many efforts in the works across Colorado as the state tries to get more Spanish-speaking students into preschool and assimilate new migrants from South America.
It also comes as Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law last week to create a bilingual licensing unit within the state Department of Early Childhood, targeting $360,000 in state funds next year to help Spanish-speaking child care providers get licensed and to expand bilingual preschool options.
Next fall, Jefferson County Head Start will have three bilingual classrooms in Arvada — for kids who speak Spanish at home and whose parents speak only Spanish, and for English-speaking children whose parents want them to learn Spanish.
Ramirez, who supervises the county’s bilingual Head Start program, spent the past year building a plan to serve the area’s growing Spanish-speaking population. Several of the families who’ve enrolled are recent migrants from Venezuela and Colombia, she said.
The nonprofit Head Start provides free preschool to low-income families. In Jefferson County, 200 children, from infants to 5 years old, are enrolled in 16 classrooms in Arvada and Wheat Ridge. Until this year, all of the classes were taught in English, which was leaving out a large segment of the community, including parents who speak only Spanish and were unsure how to access the program, Ramirez said.
When she started working at Head Start three years ago, the program had only three or four Spanish-speaking families.
“I was like, ‘Why not? Where are these people? Where is the gap?’” she said.
Ramirez developed a pilot program, which recently let out for summer vacation, and word has been spreading. Jefferson County Head Start now has eight bilingual teachers, plus two bilingual mental health specialists and two bilingual support specialists who help families access food assistance and other human services programs.
Bilingual teachers use curriculum kits, or daily lesson plans, that come in Spanish and English. Books in the bilingual classrooms are in Spanish or English, and sometimes both at once. On some days, the teachers will speak mainly in English, and on others, mostly in Spanish.
One bilingual class for the fall is already full with 20 students and a second class is nearly full with just a handful of spots left, Ramirez said.
Colorado has 77 licensed child care providers who identified Spanish as their primary language, with 25 additional pending applications, according to the state early childhood department. The state did not provide a count of how many of the 297 Head Start providers statewide offer bilingual options.
About 16% of the population in Colorado speaks a language other than English, including 11% who speak Spanish, according to the latest census. Colorado lawmakers who passed House Bill 1009, recently signed into law by Polis, said they were concerned that the language barrier is keeping kids in Spanish-speaking families from enrolling in preschool programs and keeping Spanish-speaking child care providers from getting licensed.
The state’s early childhood department had used federal pandemic relief funds to hire three bilingual employees and provide 35 licensing training sessions in Spanish, but those temporary funds will run out in September. The new funding will allow the department to offer child care licensing applications in Spanish and provide translation services throughout the process.
In Jefferson County, 17 students were in the Head Start program’s first bilingual classroom last school year, including about a dozen who spoke Spanish and five who spoke only English — at least when the class began.
Ramirez marveled at how easily all of the kids in the class began to incorporate vocabulary in a new language. When the teacher asked who wanted milk, it didn’t matter if she said it in English or Spanish — everyone understood. Many of them were speaking some form of Spanglish, or “code-switching” with a mix of the two languages, by the end of the year.
“You could definitely see a difference,” Ramirez said. “Children code-switch a lot, which I do, too. Even the kids who were monolingual, they were understanding, too.