Point Reyes Light - November 17, 2005
Shrinking Bolinas preschool now half Latino
By Peter Jamison
It’s Tuesday afternoon at the Bolinas Children’s Center, and July Palomares, a four-year-old boy who until last year couldn’t speak a word of English, is writing his name on the playground blacktop with a piece of chalk. When finished, he looks up and asks his teacher, in English, to take a look. Inside, one of his classmates – Tenaya Tremp, a native English speaker raised in Bolinas – proudly declares that she can count to ten in Spanish. She learned, she said, from July Palomares.
These scenes are now commonplace at the children’s center, where the number of Latino children has doubled in the past three years.
Before 2002, center director Jan Tremblay said, the small preschool, which shares a building with Bolinas Public Utility District, would only have one or two Latinos out of 20 children enrolled in a given year. Among the center’s three paid employees – Tremblay, Ward Young, and Lea Earnheart – only one, Young, speaks a small amount of Spanish.
This year, four of the preschool’s 11 children are Latino. Shrinking enrollment, combined with an upsurge of native Spanish speakers, has altered the cultural balance of an institution that has served Bolinas families for 33 years.
At the other preschool attended by Bolinas children, however, the effects of immigration have barely been felt. Of the 19 children at Susan Tacherra’s "Montessori-inspired" preschool north of Stinson Beach, only one is Latino. Tacherra attributes the difference to the difficulty immigrant families have finding transportation out of Bolinas. Additionally, although the two schools have roughly the same tuition (the children’s center charges $5.50 per hour, and Tacherra $6.50 per hour), the children’s center receives state money to provide financial aid for three students. Those slots are all filled this year by Latinos.
More Latinos in Bolinas
The change in enrollment at the children’s center is a reflection of larger demographic shifts in Bolinas, where an exodus of middle-income families because of rising real estate prices has coincided with an influx of immigrant workers from Guatemala and Mexico.
"What accounts for the decline in enrollment in the schools, we feel, is that middle-class families can no longer afford to live in Bolinas," Young said. At the same time, he noted, Bolinas has seen "Latino people moving in looking for work."
July Palomares’ mother, Mirta, first came to Bolinas a few years ago from Escuinapa, a town of 27,000 in the Mexican province of Sinaloa. Many Latinos in Bolinas come from Escuinapa – including Jesus Antonio Rodríguez and Dolores Rodríguez, the parents of Maitrella, one of July’s friends and classmates. "Networks of families and friends," Young said, are in part responsible for the increasing number of Latino children at the preschool.
Since her arrival here, Mirta Palomares, whose English is still imperfect, has prepared food and washed dishes for work. She now lives in Bolinas with July and his two siblings (her other son, 14, attends Tamalpais High School, and her daughter, 12, the Bolinas School). She is known in both the white and Latino communities for founding a Day of the Dead celebration at the Bolinas Community Center.
But what she seemed proudest of, waiting to take July home on Tuesday afternoon after a day spent volunteering at the preschool, was her son’s ability to write his name. In Mexico, she explained, children don’t begin school until the age of 4; here, children can start preschool at 2 or 3. She said that July Palomares has better educational opportunities here than her older son Fernando had at the same age in Mexico.
"It’s much better here, the education," Palomares said. "The learning is more fast."
In Mexico, she said, children often stay in the bosom of their extended family even as they begin school. Here, she said, it is school, and not a large group of relatives, that forms the core of a child’s social world.
But in Bolinas, she added, the comforts of family have never been far off. July Palomares’ mother, brother, sister, and uncle all live here; his grandmother is currently visiting Bolinas from Mexico.
Full immersion
Three Latino children at the center receive financial aid from the state Department of Education, allowing them to stay at the preschool from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. five days a week, while most children in the preschool leave at 1 p.m., before after-school programs begin. Their schooling serves as a full-immersion program in English.
Dolores and Jesus Antonio Rodríguez say that their daughter Maitrella, 3, now speaks more English than Spanish – which means, they admit with a laugh, that sometimes they don’t understand what she’s saying.
"It’s a mystery, really, how this works," Young says. "The kids are listening, listening, taking it all in, and they may not say anything for months." And then, once they start speaking English, they’re often close to fluency, he said.
The hands-on nature of preschool helps. Young said that the children’s center has "only a gentle focus on learning the alphabet." A typical math activity might involve arranging balls in order from smallest to largest.
Such activities permit a gentler introduction to English than a middle-school assignment in Shakespeare.
Earnheart, one of the preschool’s other teachers, said that, given the ease with which Latino children have learned English through total immersion, a move toward bilingual education would primarily benefit
children who are native speakers of English.
Young said he’d nevertheless like to bring more Spanish into the classroom, provided it can be done without sacrificing the value of English immersion for young Latinos.
"It’s finding the right balance that’s important," he said. "Do we want to translate everything into Spanish? Not necessarily. Do we need to speak more Spanish? Yes."
‘First responders’
Latino parents, who lack a four-year-old’s miraculous knack for language acquisition, are having a harder time learning English. And they are faced with challenges –securing a job, an apartment, health care, and means of transportation – that are more daunting than the children’s pre-school activities.
"More than the children, sometimes, it’s the families that need to comprehend our system," center director Tremblay said.
To that end, the children’s center has enlisted the aid of the Papermill Creek Children’s Corner, a preschool in Point Reyes Station that this summer secured $375,000 of grant money from First 5 Marin, a county agency that promotes early education. Some of that money made it possible for Papermill Creek to hire Inverness resident Lourdes Romo as a part-time family advocate. Romo, who is bilingual, visited the children’s center last week with Papermill Creek executive director Meg Frye to offer advice on helping Latino families (one educational official called the pair a "bilingual S.W.A.T. team").
Preschool, Frye said, is "the first stop for many families coming to this country," and functions, in important ways, as a social-services agency for immigrants.
"We are almost like a first responder, in a sense, for when a family moves here," Young said. "We may be their first contact in the community."
Papermill Creek is also dealing with the effects of a rising Latino population. Of the preschool’s 56 children, 22 are Latino – roughly the same proportion as in the smaller Bolinas Children’s Center. But at Papermill Creek, all teachers speak Spanish as well as English, and about two-thirds of Latino children already speak some English when they arrive, Frye said.
Short on cash
Romo plans to help Bolinas Latinos by interpreting for them at the next preschool parents’ meeting, on Dec. 8.
But in the long term, the children’s center will have to make its own provisions for Latino families; the conditions of Papermill Creek’s grant stipulate that families who want to consult Romo more extensively must travel to Point Reyes Station (Papermill Creek Children’s Corner and the Bolinas Children’s Center lie in different school districts).
Money for those provisions may be short. Unlike other local preschools, Bolinas Children’s Center relies on federal and state funding through its fiscal agent, Community Action Marin, and the sources of government education spending have, in recent years, dried up. Already, the preschool is able to provide fewer tuition subsidies to low-income families than it could in the past.
With three of the center’s four Latino children on financial aid, the center’s new cultural balance may be tied, in part, to its continued ability to secure funding.
"Now we are in the position of having families who qualify for some support," Young said, "but we don’t have enough to do that."