Building a Bilingual Staff

One Washington elementary school principal shares her success story.

The rapid rise in the Hispanic population in the interior Pacific Northwest has left many administrators scrambling to find bilingual teachers. Connie Strawn, principal at Lewis & Clark Elementary in Wenatchee, Washington, has been more successful than most. Strawn has built a dedicated, award-winning staff that accurately represents the ethnicity of the school’s student population. She shared a few tips on building a bilingual staff.

Hiring bilingual, native Spanish speakers was a very intentional thing for me. When I came to Wenatchee 13 years ago, I looked at what the needs of the kids were. At that time, about 20 percent of our student population was Hispanic. Many of them were coming to us without any Spanish-language literacy at all. One of the things I felt strongly about was that those kids needed Spanish-speaking role models, just as all kids need positive role models.

In my first year we had two teachers here who spoke some Spanish, but no native speakers at all. I just thought—we’ve got to get some native speakers here! I began reading the research, and most of it focused on the fact that students need to be taught to read in their native language first. And we just didn’t have anybody. So, every time there was an opening I took an opportunity to hire a Spanish-speaking teacher. It was a very conscious, premeditated decision. I went out of my way to look for native language candidates.

It started by just hiring one person. As he got to know me, he said, ‘This is a person we can work with. She has a vision for all kids.’ Then the word kind of got out. That’s very important. Once you have a few key people on your staff they will attract other good people. The teachers end up doing a lot of the recruitment. They know what it takes to be a good teacher and they want to bring other good teachers to the school.

I do hear a lot of administrators say that they want to hire bilingual teachers, but they can’t find any. I don’t want to be critical, but I’m not sure they’re really committed to it. You can’t hire the first person that you interview; you have to look a little bit longer if that’s what it takes. And sometimes you have to really go to bat for someone and be flexible.

For example, we hired Alfonso Lopez here as a paraprofessional while he was still going to college. We had a position open for an ESL teacher and I went to the district and said, ‘We have a person right here, he just doesn’t have his certificate yet.’ So we pushed and got him an emergency teaching certificate. He actually got to start teaching while he was finishing up his certification program.

I think the key is having a vision in place. You have to know what it is you want and then you have to stick to that vision even if you get some flak for it. I definitely had some of our Anglo teachers upset with me, because for a long time I was hiring only bilingual staff. You could see the town changing, in that more Latinos were coming in and staying, and we needed to provide for them. But not everybody was happy in the beginning, at all. Some people moved on. But the bottom line for me was: What’s best for the kids?

I don’t know that I have the magic answer. The magic answer is that there is no magic answer! It’s nothing but plain hard work. Each year we took an opportunity to hire a bilingual teacher. There were years that we contacted colleges and I made it known that I really wanted Spanish-speaking staff members to come and student teach, and we found candidates that way. But once you get started—if you’ve got the right atmosphere going—it will begin to snowball. With each new person you’re really building a family.

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