Merging Two Different Worlds: A Deep Dive Into Southampton School District's Dual Language Program and the Way It Has Bridged the Gap

Picture an average high school classroom.

Students gather around desks and tables in cliques and clusters, often grouped by gender, race, extracurricular interests, or even fashion sense. They pride themselves on being inclusive and celebrating diversity, but they also — consciously or not — gravitate toward those who mirror them.

It’s human nature — a psychological phenomenon known as affinity bias, or the “similar-to-me effect,” which is a tendency for people to prefer those who look and think like them.

But inside a dual language classroom at the Southampton School District, much of that is left at the door.

There, the desks and tables, cliques and clusters, look and feel a bit different. Students of varied backgrounds mix and mingle, conversation flowing easily — mostly in English, but sometimes in Spanish. They talk about school, their hobbies and families, their struggles and stories.

And through that connection, friendships form, bridging cultural, ancestral and linguistic gaps — often between students who perhaps otherwise would never have spoken.

“I know that my three closest friends are native Spanish speakers,” high school senior Waverly Hoffman said, “and I don’t know that that would have been the case had I not been in the ISA program.”

For nearly a decade, the Spanish Embassy’s Ministry of Culture, Education and Sports has recognized each of Southampton’s schools as an International Spanish Academy, or ISA, which “implement a Spanish-English dual language immersion curriculum with the support, consultancy and recognition of the Ministry,” according to its website.

In the last three years alone, more than 40 Southampton students have graduated as fluent Spanish and English speakers from the rigorous program — the only one of its kind on Long Island, setting an example for other districts as the region’s Latino population grows.

“We’re no longer a homogeneous, English-speaking region — and the numbers will only continue to increase,” explained bilingual speech language pathologist Selene Yoel, who is the director of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and bilingual programs at Stony Brook University.

“Exposure to things that are different — whether it be language, whether it be disability, whether it be different foods, whether it be anything — is what our kids need to be successful and good humans. It makes them more flexible in life.”

While some Southampton students say that, outside of the ISA program, two separate worlds still exist within the district — side-by-side orbits separating Spanish-speaking students from native English speakers — this longstanding and progressive curriculum seeks to combine them.

Within it, common ground emerges, filling in divides.

“When you look at what we’re trying to create in terms of welcoming and affirming environments, this program speaks right to the heart of that,” Southampton High School Principal Dr. Brian Zahn said, “of really building one community within the school, to make sure that we are all Mariners and we’re all working together.”

With Change Comes Resistance

In the 1980s, the Long Island Hispanic population grew by a rapid 62 percent, followed by an even faster 71 percent in the next decade. In the years since, that figure has dramatically decreased, hovering around 2 percent year over year.

At Southampton schools, shifts in student demographics echo that trend.

According to Superintendent of Schools Dr. Fatima Morrell, the student body in 2021-22 was 47 percent Latino and increased to 49 percent the following year. Just last year, Hispanic students passed a benchmark, weighing in as the majority of Southampton students, at 51 percent.

By the mid-2000s, the enrollment of English language learners, who all spoke Spanish, had reached 20 students at the same grade level — the minimum number set by the New York State Department of Education that requires a district to kick-start bilingual education.

And so, Southampton administrators and staff got to work, explained Joaquin Mendez, who was a Southampton guidance counselor and then-director of the English as a Second Language program, which has since changed to English as a New Language, or ENL.

“My approach was, ‘Look, we need to be inclusive and avant-garde, instead of following Albany’s rules, which say that you have to have a bilingual program,’” he said, adding, “My take on that at the time, the person I have to give credit to for listening and pursuing it, was Dr. Linda Bruno, the superintendent at the time.”

There are several pathways for English language learners that a district can take — and Bruno researched all of them, she recalled.

One option is a traditional ENL program, emphasizing English acquisition. There is also the transitional bilingual education program, which allows students to do just that: transition to a monolingual English classroom without additional supports once they are proficient.

Then there are dual language options, which are considered the “gold standard,” according to Yoel.

“We found out that dual language programs, which were just nascent at the time — they were founded in Massachusetts, in Texas, and in New York — they were so successful that, in fact, they were surpassing the academic performance of many other students,” Mendez said. “And, to me, even more importantly, since I had a counseling background, was that it integrated the non-Spanish-speaking community into the program.”

A one-way dual language program offers the opportunity to be bilingual to students who have the same home language.

But Bruno eventually landed on the two-way dual language program, which includes both native English speakers and English language learners, who all learn in both English and their home language — in this case, Spanish — typically on alternating days, though it depends on the grade level.

“We went to California to actually see what a successful dual language program looked like,” Bruno said. “And I was just so lucky at that time that the School Board supported that notion. It was just fabulous.”

Leaning on help from Mendez and Isabel Sepúlveda-de Scanlon, a community liaison at Southampton, Bruno — who is white and spoke English — wrote up her ideas, and the pair helped her translate them, allowing her to present to the Hispanic community in Spanish, she said, respectfully and meaningfully.

“I have to tell you, they were so excited that I celebrated their ethnicity,” she said. “There were a lot of issues in those days — and there still are now — about immigrants.”

And while the Latino community’s feedback was largely positive and encouraging, the same was not true of everyone else.

“I can’t tell you how negative some people were at that time,” Bruno said. “I remember one parent getting up at a board meeting and saying, ‘Why do our kids have to learn Spanish? Why can’t those spics learn English?’ It was really so negative.”

When Mendez first arrived on the East End in 1990, he attended Southampton High School, and “there were hardly any Latinos,” he said. As he came to better understand the cultural landscape of the community, he witnessed a level of alarm and rejection over immigration — culturally, politically and among some in law enforcement, he said.

“They felt that these people were going to displace the traditional service workers and families,” Mendez said, “and, also, other people didn’t like them because not all the Latinos were white, not all Latinos were Black. They were Latinos — as Latinos are — diverse and multicultural, multiracial, and so they didn’t know what to do with it.

“And I guess when you face something that is new, unusual, you sometimes react with fear.”

Some misinformed parents instead pushed for a dual language program in Chinese, pointing to the “global economy,” Mendez said. Others claimed that Hispanic immigrants were changing the East End and their way of life. Another even demanded that the educator, who is from the Dominican Republic, be fired.

“They said that the minute that I was hired, all these immigrants came,” he recalled. “And I would say, ‘You know, they were coming before I was hired, and they were coming without knowing that I was here.’

“And, mind you, the ones who came were not even from my home country. I think I had one Dominican family in 20 years.”

All told, Mendez would work at the district for over two decades, overseeing the dual language program when it was in its infancy — and defending it, as would Bruno, until she left the district in 2007.

It began two years earlier, in 2005, with 10 English speakers and 10 Spanish speakers in first grade.

For the former, Bruno touted it as an “enrichment program,” she said, where students entered their names into a lottery system to be chosen to participate. For the latter, she gave Spanish-speaking students a nonverbal IQ test and hand-selected students, she said, before opening the program to any Latino child who wanted to participate in subsequent years.

“It was kind of, I’d say, manipulative on my part,” she said, “but I knew that if I had struggling learners on the Hispanic side, it would give a negative connotation to the program, to be honest. So I kind of manipulated that a little bit in order for it to be successful.”

She sighed. “There were so many prejudices against those ‘Mexican kids,’” she said.

And yet, in this educational setting, the students began to thrive.

On Spanish-speaking days, the Latino students took charge, helping their English-speaking peers learn — and vice-versa on alternating days. Friends were quickly made across the language barrier, too, Bruno said, as students invited each other to their birthday parties and play dates. “It was, I thought, really powerful to watch the relationships grow among these 20 kids and their families.

“Now that I’m retired and I’m 75 years old, and I reflect back, I think it was the highlight of my career to develop that program in Southampton.”

How It Works

Today, the groundbreaking program spans the entire district, though the models vary from building to building.

At the elementary school, which was the first to be recognized as an International Spanish Academy in 2013, prekindergartners through fourth-graders enrolled in the program receive half of their daily instruction in Spanish — including Spanish language arts, science and social studies — and half in English.

For some students, this can be extremely challenging.

“The Hispanic kids are used to being in an English-speaking world,” Bruno said. “In the U.S., TV and such is mostly in English. But the American kids didn’t have that experience of being in a Spanish-speaking world. So, in the beginning, the English-speaking kids struggled more than the Spanish-speaking kids, which was quite amazing.”

From the outside looking in, it can be hard to imagine how exactly young English speakers are able to navigate a full day of Spanish instruction, as well as the other way around. It comes down to three principles, explained high school Spanish teacher Sarah Trujillo Underhill, who is also the ISA liaison for the building and has been involved with the program since its inception.

First, she explained, the students need to feel safe. Next, they need to have a purpose or reason for learning the language. And, lastly, they need to see it modeled around them.

For example, if a teacher is singing a Spanish song to a classroom of students about putting on their jackets, the English-speaking children look to their Latino peers to see what they’re doing, learning through visual cues.

Currently, at each grade level in the elementary school, enrollment in the dual language program hovers around 60 students, Principal Nicole Fernandez said.

“I’ve gone into classrooms and I’ve had second-graders who are English speaking, speaking Spanish to help a native Spanish speaker,” she said. “And it’s amazing, because they have the language to be able to support each other and really learn from one another.

“So it’s great. The social-emotional aspect here is really what you see the most.”

When they move to the intermediate school, which earned ISA status in 2014 — the high school followed in 2015 — students are taught in Spanish for a minimum of two periods per day. In fifth and sixth grade, those classes are Spanish language arts and social studies, which shifts to Spanish language arts and Spanish 7 in seventh grade, and Spanish language arts and Spanish 3H in eighth grade.

This is where attrition rates start to wobble. Last year, according to data supplied by the district, the number of ISA elementary school graduates in fourth grade, 61, dropped to 32 by eighth grade graduation. By 12th grade, that number was down to eight.

“The struggle is that we offer so many different great programs here that you have to make a choice,” explained High School Principal Dr. Brian Zahn, “because if you’re remaining in the dual language program, it may not allow you to remain in some of those other courses. But we’ll work with students as much as we can.”

According to former student Sa’Naya Morris, who graduated last spring, intermediate school is where the ISA program starts to count — and she almost decided not to continue, she said. But with some encouragement from her mother, she pushed through.

When she reached the high school level, that’s where it all changed. In grades nine through 11, Spanish still comprised two periods per day, but one was a language course while the other focused on culture.

And senior year focused entirely on AP Spanish and Culture — which was “absolutely no joke,” she said.

“Spanish classes weren’t a breeze anymore,” she said. “We couldn’t just make up something and the teacher would give us credit. We actually had to do rigorous Spanish work.”

To adapt her schedule to the ISA program, Morris said she gave up her lunch period during her sophomore year, as well as certain electives. Her peers faced the same tough decisions, she said, as they moved through the program together.

“My best friends were made in dual language,” she said. “We became the best of friends, because we stuck together in Spanish, we helped each other in Spanish. It felt like a family, and that’s the best part about it.

“It’s like a secret society — like you’re cooler than everybody else because you’re in dual language.”

A Real-World Impact

Lucas Martin was, technically, late to the game when he joined the ISA program in ninth grade at Southampton High School, after matriculating from Tuckahoe School.

But he had home-field advantage — at least on paper.

“My dad is native to Spain, my mom is a Spanish teacher,” he said, “but, really, my level of Spanish was very similar to those in the high school program around me, because they had such a better foundation and grammar. But I obviously had an upper hand in comprehension and speaking a little bit.”

Outside of sharpening his language skills, the program gave Martin more confidence to move through the world in Spanish, he said — so much so that the 2020 Southampton graduate earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, where he’ll return for graduate school at a sister campus in Madrid.

“When you gain a language, you gain a heart,” he said. “I didn’t know I was going to be studying four years — and, I guess, now five years — abroad, until basically the second semester of senior year of high school. So now, all those classes seem way more important than they were back then.”

The social impact of the high school classes is not lost on senior Selena Morales, who is a first-generation Mexican American. Despite her background, she grew up in Southampton speaking to her parents in English, even though they used Spanish, she said, and she often found herself caught in between different cliques in school.

But the ISA program helped remove that particular stressor in class, she said, and better express — and connect with — her heritage.

“They teach it to the ISA class, which also includes native English speakers,” she said, “and so it broadens their minds, broadens their perspective, for them to accept different cultures and different holidays that we might celebrate that they might think is weird or just not normal.”

From Central America to South America to Europe, Morris learned about the cultural nuances among varying countries — foods, traditions, religions and more.

“It was really cool, and I was so happy that I got to experience that, because it opened my eyes,” Morris said. “I didn’t know anything about immigration, really. They don’t really tell you about that in school, explain the whole process. And some of my classmates shared stories of how their parents got here, or their cousins, how things are violent there, what the living conditions are.”

These harsh realities, in part, inspired Sarah Brady — who graduated in 2020 — to double-major in Spanish and Latin American studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she now works as a paralegal at an immigration law firm.

There, she gives voice to immigrant stories by translating personal declarations from Spanish into English, detailing the hardest challenges they’ve faced in their lives.

And Brady credits her ability to do so to the ISA program in Southampton.

“The stories that I’ve heard, honestly, are heartbreaking,” she said. “Speaking Spanish, yeah, it’s one thing, but just showing up for people as a human and listening to people tell their stories in their language is another.

“You can probably tell from the way that I talk about it that it has changed my life,” she continued, “and it has given me this path I definitely wouldn’t have been on without it. And that’s why it’s so important that it continues.”

East Hampton, Too

In 2019, the East Hampton School District launched its own dual language program in kindergarten. That class entered the fifth grade this school year, reported Stephanie Dubois-Rivera, director of ENL, bilingual programs and central registration. Currently, just under half of the student body is enrolled, she said.

“I feel like the community has really, really gotten on board with it and is excited to join the program,” she said. “Each year, we have more and more parents asking to be a part of it, which is wonderful.”

Next year, it is anticipated that the program will move to the middle school, she said, which poses an opportunity to better integrate newly arrived Spanish-speaking students with English speakers and heritage Spanish speakers, who are typically of Latino descent but born in the United States.

This is an area of focus for the administration at Southampton High School, as well, explained Zahn, who is looking for ways to change graduation requirement pathways in order to allow more newcomers to join the program and also satisfy Regents requirements.

“What has been happening, which we’re trying to avoid, is something that’s called the ‘gentrification of bilingual programs,’” Underhill said, “where it’s really just serving our privileged English families.”

It is a top criticism of the largely successful program among some staff, as well as current and past students, who also expressed a need for increased Latino representation among teachers and better tools for merging demographic groups outside of the program.

“You rarely see the Hispanics and the whites and the Blacks, everyone integrating on their own,” Morris said, adding, “In my opinion, the dual language program is the best thing that Southampton offers and the thing that they do very well, but it would be nice if we could just incorporate everyone together and encourage more nonnative English speakers to stay in the program — because you can help us learn and learn from each other.”

This fall, now a college freshman, Morris is studying criminology on the pre-law track at the University of Tampa, where she imagines her B2-level Spanish will help her navigate her new home.

“I’m lucky that I have the skill, and I’m grateful that I have the skill that I do, especially going down to Florida, where there’s a lot of Spanish-speaking people,” she said. “In the ISA program, I’ve spoken to people that I definitely wouldn’t have gone out of my way to speak to, which I think is great and has definitely helped them feel more comfortable in the school setting.

“I think that’s the whole point of the program, as well,” she continued, “bringing people together from different backgrounds and having us learn from one another. And it’s definitely done just that.”

Hope Hamilton, who was a summer intern with The Express News Group, contributed reporting and translation to this story, which is available in both English and Spanish at our website, 27east.com.