Preparing Hispanic Parents and Children for School

Preschool classes, taught in Spanish at the Long Island Children’s Museum, get the parents and their children ready for the first day of classes. The parents are also taught that it is extremely important to be involved in the schools. DP

By VALERIE COTSALAS
TheNewYorkTimes.com: GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Chunky yellow Play-Doh hamburgers, jars of primary-color paint and cardboard letter tiles filled up part of a room at the Long Island Children’s Museum here. Nearby on a carpet, a group of children stared up at a teacher who turned a book around to show them the pictures.

It wasn’t exactly a scene in a kindergarten classroom, but it was close.

The museum room is designed to resemble a kindergarten, complete with a teacher and structured activities, as a way to introduce children from immigrant Hispanic families to an American classroom before they walk into one today for their first day of school.

A total of 60 children attended the first summer sessions of the museum’s pre-school program, Juntos al Kinder, Spanish for Together to Kindergarten. They were from five Nassau school districts — Hempstead, Freeport, Roosevelt, Uniondale and Westbury — with large numbers of families who speak little or no English at home.

Census figures show that since 2000, immigrant populations have grown faster in the suburbs than in New York City, a shift from traditional patterns in which immigrants first settled in cities offering lower-cost housing and jobs.

That change is readily visible in Long Island’s public schools, whose student populations are increasingly diverse.

In Uniondale, 16 of the children in the museum program will begin kindergarten. The number of Hispanic children in the district who speak only Spanish or limited English has tripled in the last five years, according to Brenda Williams-Jackson, the principal of the Northern Parkway Elementary School in Uniondale.

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