Fostering an inclusive environment at one Baltimore City school
I don’t speak much Spanish — yet. My Duolingo streak of 646 days (and counting) is proof that
I’m trying to learn it as quickly as I can. When I became principal of Fallstaff Elementary Middle School in July of 2022, one of my biggest concerns was whether the language barrier would hinder my ability to address the needs of the school.
This year, 62% of our students come from Spanish-speaking families, and another 58% of our students receive ESOL (English speakers of other languages) support, as English is not their native language. Our families come from all over including El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
When I took the job, one of the first things I learned was that the school was in need of a healing of sorts, following a tough few years in which the district had to intervene when the growing Hispanic community found themselves at odds with an earlier administration and feeling excluded following a few insensitive incidents. As my team and I reviewed data and set academic goals for our first year, our top priority became really clear and was quite simple: to create a school environment where everyone, no matter where they come from, felt included and connected.
While we’ve faced many challenges over these past two years, we’ve also seen an incredible turnaround in the culture and climate of the school during that time. We increased our enrollment by nearly 60 students at a time when many other schools are losing enrollment, reduced our chronic absenteeism by over 10% in just one school year and were one of the top three schools in improving K-5 literacy in the entire district last year. There’s no magic potion to move a school in the right direction, but we know that some key actions have helped us not only repair the harm that existed at the school prior to my arrival but also improve the academic outcomes for our students.
Here are some of the things we did immediately:
Reestablished a Parent Teacher Organization (PTO).
Any parent who wanted to take an active role in their child’s schooling was welcomed, regardless of race or language spoken at home. As I saw it, it was the school’s responsibility to mend the communication gap. Not the other
way around. Sometimes bilingual students would stay and help. Other times, I paid bilingual staff to stay late and support meetings. Imagine my surprise when the de facto PTO president informed me that the group had previously not been allowed to meet inside of the school building. We changed that immediately, welcoming all parents to join us in our beautiful, renovated, state-of-theart Weinberg library. The parents were elated. Some brought food, and using WhatsApp, we were able to grow the PTO to the point where we have a consistent 40 to 50 parents at our monthly parent meetings. While we’d love to get that number closer to 100, we are proud of the consistency we’ve seen month over month and appreciate having parent input as we strive to move the school forward. This year, our community partner, CHAI, has helped us even more by sponsoring an interpreter to attend our parent meetings and support with translation.
Sent home all communication in English and Spanish.
While many of our students are working to become bilingual, many of our parents do not speak much English, and they were being left out of updates on important events and happenings at our school. Now, every piece of communication sent home is bilingual. This
is not only required by law, but it helps ensure all families have common understandings. Our “Take Home Tuesday” folders are full of flyers of upcoming events and important dates that we need all families to be aware of, regardless of the language spoken at home. A small uptick in the amount of paper we purchase each year is well worth the investment in increased communication with families. We also increased our social media footprint on Facebook, X and Instagram to reach more families.
Hired more bilingual staff.
As we looked to rebuild the staff, we prioritized having more staff members available to help families when they come to our school. When I first arrived, our staff had just two bilingual paraeducators and one bilingual ESOL teacher. In my first round of hiring, we added a bilingual 3rd-grade teacher, a bilingual middle school science teacher, a bilingual office assistant and a bilingual community school coordinator. And for the 2024-’25 school year, we are adding a bilingual secretary. While we know this doesn’t solve every problem, having more bilingual staff helps us to communicate with families more effectively and helps families feel welcomed and fully understood when they need to share important information. Our goal is to eventually get to 40-50% of our staff being bilingual within the next 3 to 4 years.
Added adult ESOL classes.
Thanks to Kirwan funding, this year is our first with a community school coordinator (CSC), and one of the things we learned was that many of our families want to learn English but between work and family responsibilities, finding time to take a class was not realistic for many parents. So, we worked to bridge that gap. Our CSC partnered with CASA and Baltimore City Community College to pilot an adult ESOL class at Fallstaff. Community members, not just Fallstaff families, will now be able to take classes in the evenings or on Saturday mornings at our school. Over 40 parents and community members have already registered and completed the initial testing, and our first classes begin in the next few weeks. Our goal is to build these classes out so that we have anywhere from 50-100 community members learning English, free of cost, at our school. Once these classes are up and running, our next step is to offer Spanish classes to our staff as a part of professional development beginning in the ’24-’25 school year. We recognize that in order for this to be a true partnership, we have to meet our families in the middle, language included.
I remind my staff constantly
Developed incentives.
that this work is hard. Nothing about high-level education is easy. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be any joy. I believe that hard work deserves rewards, and in my two years at Fallstaff, we have prioritized incentives to increase both student and family engagement. These have included field trips to Medieval Times and Turkey Hill Experience ice cream factory for positive attendance; pro bono legal consultations for families in need; visits from the Honduran and Salvadoran embassies; family events such as Paint a Tile, Trunk or Treat and Thanksgiving turkey giveaways; visits from the Baltimore Ravens and the Ravens bookmobile; and countless other field trips and programs, including Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations with music and food free to the community. We believe that our school should be the hub of the entire Fallstaff community and our incentives and events work to keep families of all backgrounds engaged at the school. Before we can do the work of educating children, we need them in the building first. Our incentives help us to do that.
In May, we will be presenting for the first time at the Baltimore Immigration Summit, co-sponsored by the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and Towson University, and hosted at Morgan State
University. The theme of this year’s summit is Empowered Immigrant Communities: Engaging, Sharing, and Growing Together, which fits exactly with our goals here at Fallstaff. We envision a school community that embraces its diversity and sees it as value added instead of a burden. Our vision is to create a school where we strive to cultivate a diverse and inclusive educational environment where every student has the tools to flourish academically, socially and linguistically. We seek to foster an experience where all community members feel valued, supported, and equipped to contribute to the positive growth of themselves, their families, and their communities. So, while I don’t speak much Spanish yet, I choose not to let that be a barrier to helping us meet success at Fallstaff. Every student in Baltimore deserves to go to schools that care about them and their families not just as data points but as human beings. Language does not have to be a barrier to making that happen.