Introducing the Assistant Head of The French School

Salut à tous!  Nangeen def?  I have had the great pleasure of getting to know some of you through school meetings and demo lessons and visits to the school.  I am so pleased to find this group of dedicated, experienced and child-centered individuals right here in St. Louis!  I am proud to help make language immersion education available in such a strong learning environment.  I consider my own immersion education, first in French and then in Wolof, to be among my strongest assets today and believe that the best possible time to begin language acquisition is right at the beginning– kindergarten and first grade!
To better introduce myself, I hold a bachelors degree in French and American Studies from the University of Notre Dame.  Since coming here in 2007 I have worked and studied at Washington University in St. Louis.  My primary background is in nonprofit development work and this career has taken me from my home in South Bend, IN to Senegal, West Africa and back again.  I take from these experiences a sense of duty to make excellent early childhood education a reality.  It is my goal to work closely with the parents associated with the school to address the needs of the students and families in our SLLIS community.  I am here for you, so please do not hesitate to reach out to me.   I look forward to meeting and working with all of you!

Meryl Sundy

¡Saludos a la escuela de español!

I have really enjoyed getting to know some of you via email and the couple of enrollment events I’ve been able to particpate in this spring.  I especially enjoyed meeting so many of you at the first family orientation!  After our meeting, one of the teachers from the French school asked if was nervous – and with my whole heart I said, “Not nervous, exactly – excited!”  This truly is a dream come true for me.

I have been promoting the study of world languages for nearly 25 years now.  As a German teacher, I was constantly trying to involve as many children as possible in early language learning activities, so they could grow up with another language, another perspective, and with empathy and respect for the other point of view.

One exciting project we did was to take a trip one summer to Heidelberg, Germany.  Each of my students stayed with the family of his or her ePal. We had been communicating with the students in our partner school for over a year, and it really was something to meet them face to face!

I remember the day I handed out the ePal email addresses and brainstormed with the students what we would put in our first emails.  A strange thing happened – students were asking for help to correct their adjective endings and verb conjugations!  They hurried into my classroom, logged on to the computers and began their peer-edits before the tardy bell even rang.  Real kids with real things to communicate – this is what motivates language learning.

As I think about the exciting challenge ahead of us, I realize again how being in the place of a learner helps us become the very best teachers.  This will be a very easy place for us to find because so much of starting a new school is a new learning experience for educators and parents alike!

This describes my philosophy of immersion education:  We set a challenging, exciting, and meaningful task for children to learn and then spend a lot of time showing and telling (mostly showing!) them how to do it.  Then we give students courage to go for it!

All the while, we are providing ongoing, specific, corrective, and affirmative feedback designed to help them know, be, grow, and soar.  Soon they will be able to set their own meaningful tasks for learning, and we will be right there with them -providing feedback, constantly encouraging them to contribute who they are to the world around them and to make where they are a better place.
For the last three years, I have been privileged to work with some exceptional educators and parents to develop a two way immersion program (Spanish/English) in Beardstown, IL – a small town west of Springfield.  In this setting our “ePals” are REAL pals!  Literally overnight, children who had been playing separately on the playground were walking arm in arm, and sharing songs and games.  I believe this is because they were learning together in the classroom – sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English – so EVERYONE was smart, and EVERYONE needed help.
I hope this will be the guiding principle of our school: EVERYONE is smart – and EVERYONE needs help.

¡Estoy muy contenta de conocerse todos ustedes!

I am so happy to get to know you all!

Debra Cole
Head of School, The Spanish School

Cities and schools

Cities succeed when they tend to the needs of their citizens. And the history of cities shows over centuries ebb in flow in their respective national and global influence and importance. Almost always those cities whose leadership pays attention to growing trends and helps prepare their community for the unfolding future are most successful as communities in terms of economic growth, healthy citizens and general quality of life.

Globalization is such an overused term I hesitate to use it because it is used almost exclusively to examine the economic aspects of life. But globalization is increasingly a fact in social systems of communities as well. We at the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools believe that multi-lingual capabilities will become increasingly essential to both the economic and social life of St. Louis in the coming decades and therefore we are organizing to provide the highest quality education in a non-English language.

The success of our schools will be measured in very typical ways in the early years. Academic achievement test scores, parent and student satisfaction and other standard measures of success will be our yardstick in the early years. But the real test for the success of SLLIS won’t be measurable for 25 years or more as we see how well our students and our community are progressing in the 21st Century – a century that promises to reward those communities that are prepared to embrace people of different cultures, colors and capabilities. We have only scratched the surface of globalization; change will come in larger waves in coming years. Those children and those communities, which have learned to understand different cultures and to communicate with most effectively with other people will be best positioned to succeed as we progress through this era of challenging change.

Vincent C. Schoemehl
President and CEO
Grand Center, Inc.