Features
Students, Parents Thank School Board For Preserving Bilingual Program
A large number of parents and students from Franklin State Preschool and Parent Nursery showed up at the Berkeley Board of Education meeting April 15 to thank the district for not changing the school’s half-day Spanish bilingual program.
Parents were concerned that the program might be threatened by the state’s recent decision to integrate its preschool and parent nursery program with the Early Childhood Education program.
District Superintendent Bill Huyett assured them Tuesday that the changes at the state level would not affect the program or how it was delivered. “We fully understand that the program at Franklin serves families differently from our other preschool programs, and we do not want to change that,” Huyett said in a letter to parents. “We still have to work out some of the details at the district level, but, from the perspective of students and parents, the transition will be seamless.”
Franklin’s half-day bilingual program, which is said to be the only one of its kind in the East Bay, has helped children from low-income families for the past
50 years.
