Tara Fast, an OSU graduate, is currently an ESL Teacher in Grove City and sometimes Lectures for the OSU Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Southwestern City Schools is a Central Ohio school district that covers the southwestern corner of Franklin County, including the West Side and Hilltop areas of Columbus and the towns of Galloway, Alton, Darbydale, Harrisburg, Orient, and Grove City. It is unique in that, unlike most suburban school districts that are separate from Columbus Public Schools, SWCS combines rural, suburban, and urban students, sometimes in the same school.

Recently, due to an increase in immigration to the Midwestern United States, Columbus, particularly the West Side, is home to thousands of Hispanic, mostly Mexican immigrants as well as Somalis and Asians. Therefore, the number of students requiring ESL (English as a Second Language) services continues to rise in SWCS. There are now a total of 1,079 ESL students who speak twenty-eight different languages in the district. Out of those, 557 are native Spanish speakers. This number does not include the hundreds more Hispanic students who have been exited from ESL services. This occurs when the student passes an English language aptitude exam or after he or she has been a student in the district for three years.

The Hispanic ESL students face many challenges when they arrive and are placed in school. Obviously, the language barrier prevents them from understanding classroom instructions and assignments. Also, this prevents their parents from understanding written communication from the school. At times, the parents are either illiterate or native speakers of Mixtec, Zapotec, or other indigenous Mexican languages, so even documents translated to Spanish do not help.

Another issue is that many of the students at the middle and high school level have jobs, so they do not always complete homework assignments, which negatively affects their grades. Currently, the Hispanic high school drop-out rate is at 49% in the state of Ohio. At SWCS, some Hispanic students drop out as well. Male students often leave school to work and female students leave either to work or due to marriage and/or pregnancy. One of the biggest challenges of the district is to maintain open communication with the families and to emphasize the long term importance of having an education.

The school district employs ESL personnel in all of the buildings. These teachers, tutors, or bilingual assistants work with the ESL students specifically to build their fluency in English and ease their cultural adjustment to living in Ohio. The district also takes advantage of local volunteers. Mentoring programs for Hispanic students have proven to be highly successful, resulting in higher grades, improved self-esteem, and discouragement from gang activity. The biggest program in place is Big Brothers Big Sisters at Westland High School, Norton Middle School, and Prairie Norton Elementary School, which are the schools that cover Wingate Village (formerly Lincoln Park West), a predominantly Mexican apartment complex of 5,000 residents on the West Side of Columbus. I would highly encourage any Hispanic or Spanish-speaking OSU student to become involved with Hispanic ESL students at SWCS. The positive effects on the child, his or her family, and the local Hispanic community are long-standing.

The coordinator of BBBS is Ami Peacock, who can be reached at
839-2447 or apeacock@bbbscentralohio.org.

For further information on SWCS or the ESL department,
you can contact me, Tara Fast, ESL Teacher at 801-3331 or
tara_fast@swcs.k12.oh.us or Rene Phillips, ESL Coordinator or María Bonachea, Cultural Diversity Coordinator at 801-3000