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80 percent of our families speak Spanish in the home. A few years back, we noticed a — I
guess it could be described as a spike in referrals for language acquisition issues
for a number of our younger kids, and when we looked at it, statistically, it was an
anomaly.
It didn't make sense that that many kids would be showing up with a language acquisition
issue. So we probed a little bit deeper and found that indeed it wasn't a language acquisition
issue, it's that we didn't understand that these students were speaking a different language
than Spanish. To our ear, it sounded the same, and we assumed incorrectly that they were
speaking Spanish. So when we would test them in Spanish, they still showed a language acquisition
issue.
Upon further investigation, we find out that it is a language called Mixtec, which is a
pre-Columbian language only written down in the late nineties when a graduate student
went to the mountains of Central Mexico, went to these villages and wrote the language down
as part of their graduate work.
And it's such a specific dialect that even among 60 or so villages in the central mountains
of Mexico, you go two or three or four villages away, and those folks wouldn't be able to
understand the folks from another village. So what we found was a growing population
of Mixtec speakers here at Wolfe.
We started out with one or two families. Not quite sure of an actual percentage number
that we currently have, but it's grown to more and more families, and we're still discovering
other families that actually are speaking Mixtec or where the grandparents speak Mixtec,
where it's some mixture in the household, because for the longest time there was a sort
of stigma attached to admitting that you spoke Mixtec.
And as people have felt more comfortable admitting this, we've realized that more families do
have a mixture of Spanish, Mixtec and then some English all happening at the same time
in the household. And it's something for us to puzzle out in terms of knowing our students
and how to understand how we assess them and understand how we assist them once we handle
their needs.