Having experienced feeling like an outsider during their required , dozens of EMU grads employed by Harrisonburg City schools are using their cross-cultural sensitivity in support of the schools’ 36% of students from homes where 50 languages other than English are spoken.

Alexis Rutt ’06, MEd ’11, for example, works with the schools’ Newcomer Program. The program began in 2006, in response to the influx of immigrant children entering area schools with little-to-no English language skills.

“These kids are amazing,” Rutt says of the 25 current Newcomer Program middle school students, representing eight countries and speaking five languages. Some are part of the Refugee Resettlement Program and have lived through unimaginable atrocities, she says. “They aren’t victims… They keep showing up, eager to learn and grateful for what they’ve been given. Every day in the classroom is an exercise in humility for me.”

Rutt says her cross-cultural experiences in New Zealand and Fiji were transformative, helping her to be welcoming to people from other cultures.

During his cross-cultural in Guatemala, Adam Shank ’06 lived in the home country of many who had family members in the United States, making him aware that these immigrants left their homeland for “basically the same reasons that my ancestors did hundreds of years ago.”

Shank combined this experience with a double major in justice, peace and conflict studies and Spanish, and spent three years in Nicaragua as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer. He then resettled in Harrisonburg to work with the Latino population. As the homeschool liaison for Smithland and Waterman Elementary schools, he works with students and parents to foster relationships between school and home.

Gary Painter, who has hired many EMU alumni since he started working as a Harrisonburg school administrator in 1999, recognizes cultural empathy as an educator’s asset. The cross-cultural experience bolsters a graduate’s odds of being hired, and reinforces their success with non-Western learners once in the classroom, he says.

Rutt and Shank are two of the over 40 EMU alumni working in cultural diversity roles in Harrisonburg City Schools: 26 ESL teachers, two ESL instructional coaches, two ESL specialists, and a dozen home-school liaisons.

Harrisonburg’s city schools have fully embraced addressing the needs of students who arrive speaking a language other than English. But back in the 1990s, this was not the case when Linda Bland ’64 was asked to expand her role as a reading supervisor to encompass foreign language and English as a second language programs.

Then-ESL teacher Jeremy Aldrich, now Harrisonburg schools’ foreign language coordinator, remembers Bland “inching us year by year into better instructional practices,” encouraging cultural sensitivity and a welcoming atmosphere for foreign-born students.

Bland recruited dual-language education pioneers Wayne P. Thomas and Virginia P. Collier for teacher and administrator workshops, and cultural anthropologist and local immigration researcher Laura Zarrugh for diversity training.

Zarrugh considers Bland’s work “foundational in establishing the ESL program in city schools and easing the cultural adjustments.”

— Samantha Cole ’11

This assignment put Linda Heatwole Bland “on the fastest learning curve in my life.” Initially hired as a reading supervisor in 1986, Bland later was assigned to foreign language and English as a second language programs. She found the schools “scrambling” to accommodate the influx of immigrant and refugee families. Knowing no foreign language, she recalls, “I had no experience dealing with it.”

Peers credit Bland, who retired in 2002, with tilling the soil for an innovative dual-language immersion program begun in 2010. At , children native to Spanish (the most common language among U.S. immigrants) and those native to English are offered the option of spending each day partly immersed in the other language, with half of their day spent in Spanish and the remainder in English.

From Three-Room Schoolhouse to …

After earning a bachelor’s in at EMU, Bland taught in her native state of Ohio and West Virginia. Her experiences in a three-room school prompted her to earn a master’s degree in reading at West Virginia University before returning to teach in Virginia and eventually, Harrisonburg.

Bland asked the city’s language teachers for help, promising, “I can coordinate anything, but I will count on you to be the experts in your content. ”

“Linda always made everyone feel special. It was a gift of hers – listening in that way,” says Laura Feichtinger McGrath, Harrisonburg’s current coordinator of English as a Second Language (ESL).

Bland’s lengthening title – “Instructional Supervisor for Reading, English, Language Arts, Foreign Languages and (for the last few years) ESL” – reflected escalating challenges.

Cultural Sensitivity

Early “limited English proficient” children were placed in reading-resource groups, often leaving local children on waiting lists for literacy help. ESL began with just two teachers, division-wide, conducting “pullout” sessions.

Classroom teachers had no training in immigrant children’s needs, said Bland. “Some children arrived highly educated in their native languages; others had never attended school.”

Then-ESL teacher Jeremy Aldrich, now Harrisonburg schools’ foreign language coordinator, remembers Bland “inching us year by year into better instructional practices,” encouraging cultural sensitivity and a welcoming atmosphere for foreign-born students.

Bland recruited dual-language education pioneers Wayne P. Thomas and Virginia P. Collier for teacher and administrator workshops, and cultural anthropologist and local immigration researcher Laura Zarrugh for diversity training.

Zarrugh considers Bland’s work “foundational in establishing the ESL program in city schools and easing the cultural adjustments.”

From Two to 24 Teachers

Bland arranged Spanish classes for teachers and staff, while requesting additional ESL faculty almost yearly. From the original two teachers, their numbers have increased to 24 today. More than a third of the city’s students now are English-language learners.

Meanwhile, Bland recalls, “We began the conversation about a dual-language program, and to explore what it would look like.” In Arlington, Va., “a carload of teachers spent the day” observing dual-language immersion classes. They visited with Arlington’s ESL coordinators, who “just shared everything they knew with us.”

A successful program, they realized, would require a critical mass of bilingual teachers and children. Then-ESL teacher Deanna Benavides, who participated in the visits, remembers that in Harrisonburg, no single school at that time had necessary numbers.

That would change under Wanda Hamilton, who succeeded Bland when she retired in 2002. Smithland’s current principal, Gary Painter, collaborated with Bland and then Hamilton in setting up Harrisonburg’s first dual-language immersion program.

Thriving Dual-Language Immersion

He reports Smithland’s dual-language immersion program continues to expand up and out (adding a grade each year, now serving grades K-2, with hopes to add it in another school in the fall of 2013). For the 2012-2013 school year, Smithland has 120 students in the program.

“The parents and students love it,” Painter said, adding that it has proved to be a painless, fun way for students to acquire a second language.

Meanwhile, since 2011, the Foreign Language in Elementary Schools resource program has given all city children weekly Spanish lessons.

In 2002, Bland received the Virginia State Reading Association’s James D. Mullins Award for exemplary leadership and the Distinguished Service Award of the Shenandoah Valley Virginia Chapter of Pi Delta Kappa.

Bland and husband Sidney Bland, retired from teaching history at James Madison University, live in Massanutten Village east of Harrisonburg. She frequently returns to EMU, serving on the board for 10 years as well as researching her local Heatwole ancestors.