By Rob Novit, Aiken Standard
For years, Ingrid Mimcella has visited her young daughter, Fatima, in Guatemala, where the 10-year-old has lived with her grandmother.
PHOTO BY ROB NOVIT/Aiken Standard Ingrid Mimcella’s daughter, Fatima, pictured here in class at Oakwood-Windsor Elementary School, came to Aiken in January and is learning English through the District ESOL program.
Her dream of bringing her daughter to America came true in January when Fatima arrived in Aiken. She soon enrolled at Oakwood-Windsor Elementary School, and Fatima could not speak English. She would cry when she could not understand the teacher, her mother said.
“I told her it would not be a problem,” Mimcella said, “One day you will speak English.”
The Aiken County School District currently has 13 instructors of English for Speakers of Other Languages, also known as ESOL. Fatima has been getting help at Oakwood-Windsor, and the results are starting to pay off.
She could have years of continued English proficiency lessons ahead. Yet by mid-May, Fatima is already learning and understanding more English words – all with a big smile, too.
“This country is good for me and my family,” Mimcella said.
The numbers of ESOL students within the Aiken County School District surely sound astounding. In a district of about 24,000 students, 1,500 qualify for ESOL instruction, said Mary McGuire, the program director.
Spanish is the most common foreign language in Aiken County, “but there are 38 others,” McGuire said – among them Vietnamese, Indian dialects, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Cantonese, German and one of several Punjabi dialects.
Before McGuire took the ESOL position in 1997, she was teaching adult education with many non-English speaking people.
“There was no K-12 program for ESOL then,” she said. “I realized we had to have a program for those students. Every year we have increased numbers and languages. There are better means of identifying them.”
Read the full article by Rob Novit from Aiken Standard.
