The first freshman class to come out of Stocktrail Elementary’s Dual Language Immersion program is getting ready for a state language competition in the spring. The scene — on a December morning in Campbell County High School, room 201 — is surreal.
While every student in the approximately 25-person class is participating, they’ve been tasked with tackling a variety of folk tradition-themed projects, ranging from dances to paintings to video.
The handful of students who’ll be performing the Mexican folk dance “Baile de los Viejitos,” or “Dance of the Old Men,” crouch into Spanish teacher Renee Fritzen’s classroom with bent backs and wobbly canes. When the music changes its tempo, the teens straighten up and start marching in a spinning whirlpool formation, using their canes to swing around straw hats.
Behind them, their classmates barely look up — the Dance of the Old Men, which originated in the western Mexican state Michoacán and predates Spanish in the region, is nothing new to them.
When Fritzen and Stocktrail Elementary School principal Bertine Bahige talk about Spanish instruction, as part of the DLI program or otherwise, they stress that part of the goal is to confer an idea of the culture and traditions of a wide variety Spanish-speaking countries — to give students an idea of a world beyond Gillette.
Several Stocktrail and CCHS students testified to getting the most impactful sense of those cultures from their Spanish-speaking teachers, hailing from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Spain, to name a few.
“It was nice to learn the language that my parents grew up speaking,” said CCHS DLI student Jonathan Aguay, 15. “It’s nice to know the culture about it too, because … our first grade teacher (was) from Peru, so we learned … about her and how her culture was.”
After spending about two-thirds of their lives in the program, it’s slightly difficult for the program’s oldest cohort to talk about what has made the experience unique, educationally or otherwise. But that global exposure, beginning in their first years in Stocktrail and persisting through junior high and into CCHS, was one of their most-cited highlights of DLI.
By many accounts, the teen DLI students are all extremely competent Spanish speakers, and even better listeners. If they’ve not yet reached perfect fluency, Fritzen says it’s likely they’ll be solidly in the mid-intermediate range by the end of the year. Hopefully, if all goes to plan, future DLI students will be snagging college-level Spanish literature credits through the University of Wyoming before they even graduate high school.
And what’s already soaked through — the internationally-sourced mentorship, competency solid enough to communicate with Spanish speakers and an extremely early age, and even reoccurring Spanish dreams — is perhaps more than proof positive of an effective program.
Bahige, the DLI program’s coordinator, is perhaps, according to a News Record profile in 2021, “the most interesting man in Wyoming.” To understand Stocktrail’s path to becoming one of the top ranked elementary school in the district, it bears repeating why.
Bahige, who grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was taken from his home by rebel militia leaders as a teenager, and after escaping lived in a refugee camp in Mozambique for five years. After coming to America to live with a missionary couple, Bahige taught himself English, worked his way through community college and earned a scholarship to the University of Wyoming.
Bahige has said that he was taught the importance of education at a young age. It was the one and only way for him to improve his circumstances, he said, and failure in that regard wasn’t an option.
Stocktrail’s recent academic achievement record, relative to both the district and the state, reflect that ethos. Bahige said academic excellence and cultural competency are two of the main desired outcomes of the program.
“To me, I think it’s really important our students learn those (cultural competency) skills, to understand that there’s a larger world, and we are interconnected to the world outside of … the state of Wyoming,” he said. “You go to any European country, you’ll find people who speak more than three, four, five languages, (they) don’t even think about it.”
To his best recollection, the district started seriously considering a dual language program back in 2015, when the board chair at the time, David Fall, expressed interest in the idea. Then a math teacher at CCHS, Bahige said a famously effective dual language program in Utah had also caught their attention.
An ‘exploratory committee’ of district administrators put together two teams: one to visit the program in Utah, and another to China to explore possible routes for a dual-language Mandarin program. Bahige said that at the time, Campbell County was exporting a significant amount of coal to China.
“We decided that ‘It will be best to survey the community, to figure out which way we’ll go,’” Bahige said. The vote was cast in favor of a Spanish program.
The program began with Stocktrail Elementary, which opened its doors in 2016. Bahige said its first years involved a lot of campaigning to make parents with kids in first grade and kindergarten aware of it. It may have helped that he’d placed his own daughter, Gisele Bahige, in the program’s first set of first graders.
Students at Stocktrail spend half their day receiving instruction in Spanish, learning math exclusively in Spanish until fourth grade. Once DLI students reach Twin Spruce Junior High, that instruction becomes subject-specific, with social studies classes taught in Spanish.
If this method comes with an extra level of difficulty, it’s also given students from exclusively English-speaking homes enough competency to communicate with Spanish speakers from a very early age.
Learning subjects with course-specific jargon has produced one of the more challenging byproducts of DLI: both elementary and high school students said they were sometimes unable to talk about what they’d learned in English at all.
“My grandpa … asked me what I do in school, and most times I have to say it in Spanish, because I don’t know how to say it in English,” said Stocktrail fifth-grade student Aniya Mckinney, 10. “Our English teacher sometimes will teach us a little math, (and) it’s hard to understand what she means when we learn something new in Spanish.”
The freshman described a similar experience with concepts they’re learning in social studies.
“Some of the words aren’t very similar,” said Analee Norton, 15. “When somebody tells me, ‘scarcity,’ I don’t think of escasez immediately.”
The other side of such intense instruction is a purity that’s hard to replicate otherwise. Bahige said the accuracy of his students’ pronunciation is impressive, a byproduct of their instructors’ background.
“They speak with the Spanish accent, depending (on) the Spanish teacher, and they start picking up on some of those mannerisms and nuances in the language,” Bahige said.
And they do speak, well outside the confines of Stocktrail. Several fifth-graders described situations where they were able to have conversations their monolingual parents couldn’t.
“(My mom is) a dental hygienist, sometimes I meet some of her Spanish speaking patients,” said Koryn Urlaub, 11. “She has a gal at her work that talks in Spanish to me and my sister, and my mom never knows what we’re saying, but we talk to her like it’s natural.”
Paisley Hart, 11, said it feels “really special” to be able to communicate in Spanish with a cashier when her mom isn’t able to. That ability comes in hand on vacations, too, she said.
“My mom’s like, ‘Okay, go talk to that person … tell us where to go,’ and it just feels really nice to be able to do that,” she said.
What may be the best sign of all of the Stocktrail students’ relationship to Spanish comes from an unlikely source: their dreams.
“I have a cousin … (who was) coming to (this) school. I saw her, and in my dream, I was telling her the animals in Spanish, I was going through the letters and the sounds,” said Isabel Anderson, 10. “And I remember talking to Koryn, all in Spanish.”
It’s safe to say that for Anderson, Spanish has become more than something she’s learning in class. It’s something that comes with its own idea of the world, its own animals and sounds — and it deserves to be taught.