Bilingual Education Takes On a New Twist : Language: Two Valley schools offer Spanish-only kindergarten and first grade classes for non-English and English-speaking students.

This year Jared White, an English-speaking 6-year-old from West Hills, has had to do what Spanish-speaking children in Los Angeles have done for generations: Attend school in a language he didn’t understand.

At first, said his mother, Barbara White, it was tough going. But she and others who have enrolled their children in Hamlin Street School’s language academy believe the effort will pay off.

“The world is changing, the marketplace in the future will value languages. . . . I just think this will be good for him,” White said.

The program, which started this school year at Hamlin and Limerick Avenue School in Canoga Park, is a twist on old themes in bilingual education. The kindergarten and first-grade classes are conducted almost entirely in Spanish, and the aim is not simply to integrate Spanish-speaking children into English-language schools, but to train English speakers in Spanish.

One hundred twenty children--about half who are native-English speakers--are enrolled in the program, the first two-way language immersion program in the San Fernando Valley.

A total of four schools have two-way Spanish immersion programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Others are Weigand Elementary in Watts and Grandview Elementary in Mar Vista.

The district also started a two-way Korean immersion program at Cahuenga Elementary near Koreatown this year, and plans to expand the program to Denker Elementary in the Gardena area, and Wilton Place Elementary in Koreatown next fall, said Geri Herrera, director of model bilingual programs for LAUSD.

Combining English and non-English speakers in language immersion classes is becoming a popular approach to bilingual education throughout the district: Both Valley schools plan to expand their programs to higher grade levels next year, and two more schools are scheduled to introduce the concept next year in other parts of the district.

Parents of English-speaking children say the program takes advantage of young children’s natural knack for learning languages. School officials say a child who is immersed in Spanish at age 5 has a good chance of being proficient by fifth or sixth grade--years before most conventional second-language classes are available.

For Spanish speakers, the program allows children to learn English in stages--in part from interaction with English-speaking classmates--while at the same time allowing them to stay in touch with their roots.

“I see a lot of people coming from Spanish-speaking homes, but they don’t speak much Spanish anymore,” said Rosa Hernandez, explaining why she enrolled her son Samuel--who speaks Spanish--in the program. “I think it’s important to know both.”

English is phased in over several years in the language academy classes. Kindergartners spend about 90% of their class time being taught in Spanish. By fourth grade, half the school day is in Spanish, half is in English.

Hamlin kindergarten teacher Andres Sanchez said his students have never heard him speak English. Now, well into the school year, the English speakers in his class respond readily to Spanish commands, and plainly understand what’s happening in class. But they speak only scattered words of Spanish of their own accord.

When Sanchez picks three youngsters to play billy goats in an impromptu skit, for example, an English-speaking boy in back whines in both tongues:

“I never get to be a chivo !” he wails.

Tests of similar programs in other districts have shown that, on average, English speakers in language immersion programs outperform their peers by the end of elementary school in both English and Spanish, said Sara Applebaum, instructional adviser to the program.

Spanish-speaking children do not perform as well on average as English speakers on standardized tests, but those in language immersion programs do better than Spanish-speaking peers in other bilingual programs, she said.

“It reduces the gap,” she said. By contrast, many conventional bilingual programs “limit everything. . . . They are not good in English, and they are not good in Spanish,” Applebaum contends.

Although a handful of parents have pulled their students from the program--due to moves and concerns that their child wasn’t catching on--the voluntary program has drawn considerable interest. Kindergarten classes are packed at both schools, and requests keep coming in.

“This is an incredible thing to find in this little West Valley elementary school,” said Richard Goldsmith, a foreign-language teacher who stopped by Hamlin recently to ask about enrolling his twin grandsons.

“You see this blond, blue-eyed kid out there with these Latinos, and they are socializing and learning each others’ values . . . it’s extraordinary.”