When school restarts in the fall, Hollister will have a preschool where students learn colors, shapes, numbers and letters in two languages instead of one.
Called Los Puentecitos/Little Bridges Bilingual Preschool, the program run by St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and located on 720 Monterey St. will introduce students to the Spanish and English languages through songs, books and games.
Church administrators were inspired to start the school after several families who had children attending the Hollister School District’s Hollister Dual Language Academy asked why there wasn’t a bilingual preschool in town that could prepare their children to learn multiple languages at a younger age.
“There’s a lot of bilingual daycares and that kind of thing (in Hollister) but in terms of a formal academic preschool type thing, we think we’re the first,” said Amy Denney Zuniga, the reverend of St. Luke’s and the program administrator of the new preschool.
This school year, the site will welcome between 15 and 30 students to classes held two, three and five times a week, depending on each student’s tuition plan.
By mid-school year, the Hollister Montessori Preschool – which has rented property from St. Luke’s for about 15 years – plans to move to a new location, leaving space for the new preschool to expand. At that point, administrators expect to separate the students into two classes: one for students who attend two to three days a week and a second for full-time students. The school will also accept an additional 15 to 20 students at that time.
Zuniga hopes the program will attract families from English-speaking, Spanish-speaking and bilingual households.
“The idea is that we’re building bridges between different culture and language groups, really with the conviction that it’s important for people to come together across language and culture and socio-economics,” Zuniga said.
The school’s bilingual emphasis is close to Zuniga’s heart as she speaks Spanish and English and has done ministry work in El Salvador. Her oldest son, Jacob, 6, was born in El Salvador and holds dual citizenship there and in the U.S. While Jacob is too old to participate in the program, her younger son, Lucas, 3, will be in the classroom practicing both languages.
When the preschool opens its doors in early September, classes will run from 8:30 a.m. to noon. Students will work with two teachers including a native English speaker, Julie Dupris, and a native Spanish speaker, Dolores Castillo.
“We’re excited about just the possibilities that exist in developing a program from scratch,” said Dupris, who is also the preschool’s director.
For Dupris, the goal of the program is to make students comfortable with multiple languages, so that the transition to a language immersion school, such as the Hollister Dual Language Academy, would be easier.
“There are various programs that have Spanish-speaking teachers and things such as that, but this is a little different in that we’re trying to really embrace the children’s home language and culture,” she said.
Dupris will bring at least eight years of experience working with San Benito County’s rural mobile preschool program – which serves a large number of Spanish-speaking students in Paicines and southern San Benito County – to the new school.
While Dupris values her students’ academic success, she also wants to see her pupils grow as young people, who share, clean up and cooperate with other children.
“That is one of the keys. The social-emotional development of children is so important. A lot of people think going to kindergarten, they need all their academics down pat,” Dupris said. “But really, their social-emotional development is truly what indicates their success in school.”
In the classroom, Dupris plans to focus on teaching her students such important skills as how to make friends and how to approach the teacher.
“All of those things are really more indicative of a student’s long term success in school,” she said.
