URBANA — Felix Ayanbode has statistics at his fingertips for why his daughter should learn multiple languages.
His first grader, Faith, is learning to be bilingual in French and English at Urbana District 116’s first multilingual school, Yankee Ridge Elementary.
“When you know another language, you are able to have a peek into another culture. You are multiculturally competent, which is one of the soft skills that employers are looking for,” Ayanbode said.
“Over the long haul, people that learn foreign languages earn 4% more than people that don’t speak foreign languages.”
Urbana teachers and administrators fought for over two years to bring the district’s Spanish dual language elementary programs under one roof, arguing they needed to share resources to better serve Spanish speaking families.
The District 116 school board voted this spring to move all the programs into Yankee Ridge, where the district’s French dual language program was based.
Ayanbode was worried that the district would eliminate the French program, so he was happy to learn that would not be the case.
“The most important thing to me was that I didn’t want my daughter to stop learning French. So I’m quite glad that they kept the program here, and then my daughter gets to be in a bilingual school,” Ayanbode said.
The start of the school year had some hiccups, like long wait times to pick up his daughter by car, but those issues seem to be smoothing out, he added.
About 290 monolingual students had to move out of the Yankee Ridge building to allow the other programs to move in. The current enrollment at Yankee Ridge is about 480.
Many monolingual families had opposed the change, arguing it came too quickly, that there wasn’t enough evidence that it would help or that it would increase segregation in the district.
Diana Roque’s younger sister just started kindergarten. Initially, she was worried her sister would see the same kids all the time.
“I went to Leal [Elementary in Urbana], and I remember having a very diverse environment – not as diverse as right now, which is what I think I’m mostly excited about for my sister,” Roque said.
Mayeli Cordero Mata is the parent of a Yankee Ridge second grader, who moved with the Spanish-English program from Dr. Preston Williams Elementary School.
Mata said she thinks parents were not given enough time by Urbana District 116 to understand the changes being made.
“I feel like we did not have the opportunity to analyze, see and listen to what changes were going to be made and why,” she explained. “They just said there was going to be a change and that was it.”
The school board did discuss the changes at meetings for years and consultants held listening sessions on the issue, but many parents have said those communications did not reach them.
Mata said she will continue to track her child’s Spanish skills and education to determine whether the change is working.