Growing Hispanic population prompts Woodland teachers to learn Spanish

Woodland — Woodland Public Schools staffers have started meeting once a week for Spanish classes to help connect with the district’s growing Hispanic population. The classes are taught by Milagros Wells, Woodland’s English-language-learner outreach coordinator and a native Spanish speaker who decided to offer the classes for free to her colleagues. Wells got the idea after an administrator approached her about learning Spanish, since there are nearly 280 Hispanic families in the district who speak little to no English. The classes started in October. Wells works with each staff member by practicing sentence structure, pronunciation, enunciation and vocabulary. “We want to encourage our bilingual students to continue to speak their native language, and one way to do this is to provide the staff with some fundamental words to interact with those students on a day-to-day basis,” Wells said in a release from the district. “For our staff, it’s not about picking up the entire language. It’s about learning how to communicate and validate diversity.”