Community members weigh in on school district multilingual programs in biennial public forum
Mar. 25—GRAND FORKS — Community members gathered at South Middle School on Monday night to consider the future of multilingual magnet schools in Grand Forks and whether to redraw school boundaries.
Dozens of community members met in small group discussions as part of a biennial forum held by the school district to review local demographic trends and to hear residents' perspectives on the district's most pressing issues.
North Dakota school districts are required to hold public forums every other year to discuss the changing makeup of districts and how those changes may affect academic and extracurricular programs, staff levels and tax levies, among other matters.
At issue Monday was whether to continue to operate a handful of elementary and middle magnet schools with multilingual programs or to expand multilingual learning to all elementary and middle schools.
"I want to get feedback on where residents would like to see our multilingual students go," Superintendent Terry Brenner told the Herald. "Depending on the outcome of that, it could determine whether we reactivate that demographic taskforce to look at that."
Four elementary schools — Winship, Century, Discovery and more recently Lake Agassiz Elementary — and South Middle School, currently host multilingual learning programs.
The magnet schools allow the district to use its multilingual educators more effectively but students in the magnet schools face transportation challenges and often cannot participate in their neighborhood schools, a model Grand Forks Public Schools also pushes.
"Pragmatically, when you cluster students in one area, there's a financial gain, but when you take a kid out of their neighborhood school and they don't know their students, their friends and their neighborhood, there's an equity issue," Brenner said.
Moving away from the magnet school model would also likely require the school district to redraw school district borders, an already regular concern for the district as Grand Forks' population continues to expand south.
Residents' perspectives were collected by district staff and will be organized for review by administrators.
Forums help the school district weigh public opinion and can influence district policy. Administrators used the 2022 forum to take the temperature on whether residents would support a referendum to fund a new Valley Middle School as well as facilities upgrades throughout the district — a measure that succeeded by a two-thirds vote a year later.
Lanie Sandhu, an international teacher from the Philippines whose kids are part of the district multilingual program, said she favors putting the program in more schools.
She pointed out the district expects to see more students who speak English as a second language in coming years.
"We are expecting to have more multilingual students, so we have to have more teachers to serve multilingual kids," she said. "We can't just have it at one school."
Chulita Goodman, who has children at Century and South, said she feels parents with multilingual students were unrepresented in her discussion group, though the district employed measures like providing child care and translators to facilitate a broader range of families to participate.
Goodman said she appreciates the diversity of her children's schools as a result of the magnet programs but also said she recognizes the challenge transportation poses for multilingual families.
"There are a lot of little pieces that make this work well," she said. "I want all of our students to be able to learn effectively, but it's a matter of resources."
