Elizabeth Wahl was worried. Alejandro, her kindergarten-going son, was refusing to speak Spanish even though her husband is from Chile and the family is bilingual.

When Alejandro felt ashamed to speak Spanish in public, Wahl decided it was time to do something about it. She wanted their children to appreciate the richness of the Spanish language as native speakers.

"I saw an advertisement for the Spanish immersion program in a paper and thought about trying it out," she said. Within months of enrolling in Escondido Elementary School, she saw a change in her son's attitude. "He became excited about speaking Spanish and now he's at the stage where he is reading Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' in Spanish," she said. "The school gave him some kind of validation."

The Spanish immersion program is a popular two-way immersion program that brings together English and Spanish speaking children to develop full bilingualism in both languages. Thnking that this was the perfect program to reflect and cater to the cultural diversity of this region, the Palo Alto School District decided to try it..

"The school board felt strongly about overcoming the language differences by having another language class," said John Barton, vice vresident of the Palo Alto School Board.

When the idea was floated to the parents, they got so excited that they organized a fund raising program to fund the start up. After two trial years the program was started at Escondido in 1995. At present there are six Spanish immersion classes, starting from kindergarten to a newly added sixzth grade at Jordan Middle School. Each year thirty students are accepted into Kindergarten, but the program has been so popular that the school has started a lottery to pick students. Though preference is given to native Spanish speakers, yet nearly 50percent of the students come from non-Spanish speaking families.

One reason for the programs popularity can be found in the demographics of this area. 36percent of the children going to Escondido are minorities, coming from 30 countries and speaking more than 20 different languages.
"I lived abroad and both my husband and I can speak two other languages," says parent Donna Minnich, , a member of a Spanish immersion parents organization. "We wanted our child to have that ability too because we felt that knowing a second language would open doors for him. We wanted our child to think of himself as the citizen of the world."

The curriculum at Escondido is the same as that in the other Palo Alto elementary schools. The only difference is that in the immersion program the subjects are taught in Spanish. Starting from kindergarten at Escondido 90 percent of the instruction is in Spanish, but it decreases from year to year till it becomes 50 percent Spanish and 50percent English by the fifth grade..

"In the first couple of weeks the children are confused, but it's amazing to see how quickly and how much they learn," said Caterina Porcella, a kindergarten and first grade teacher at Escondido. The high-standardized test scores of the school support this claim.

"The test scores have shown that these kids have done just as well or even better than regular students," says Daunna Minnich. Her eldest daughter, Fiona, started the program in and is now in grade six, while her second daughter Sabrina is inthird grade. "I guess the reason the children seem to be doing so well is because they have to work harder and that makes their minds stretch more."

But the program is facing problems in getting curriculum materials in Spanish. "Teachers translate or alternatively develop books for the curriculum" said Gary Prehn, Principal Escondido Elementary School. "Its an ongoing challenge,"

But parents like Elizabeth Wahl are satisfied with the result. "The school does a wonderful job," she said.

Prehn returns the compliment. "The parent group," he says, " are good at getting the resources we need."

Through fundraising by SIPAPA (Spanish Immersion Parents Association of Palo Alto), a fund has been set aside a fund that covers overhead costs for the program such as books and tapes for the library. Minnich, who has been involved in the program since the start, remembers a time when books were scarce and students had to the same books again and again.

Now they have a well-stocked resource library, as well as online sources.
The program has helped develop a sense of community and belonging among the students and parents, say school officials and parents alike. . In fact some of the non Spanish-speaking parents have taken Spanish classes to keep up with their children and to get to talk to the parents of their children's friends.

Says Minnich, "We as parents have to work hard to bridge the cultural gap. So we smile and say ole."

Editor's note: A good topic for your beat. You did well with the reporting. Take a look at the editing and the comments and see if you don't think another draft would have improved the writing. Note particularly all the changes that were made with school grades and percentages to make the piece conform with AP style. You must look these things up in the stylebook. Every correction requires extra keystrokes, and writers who don't observe style are saying, in effect, that they are content to require whomever edits their copy to spend a lot of time of their time fixing what should have been done correctly the first time. The responsibility for clean copy begins with the writer.