Demographics
My school demographics represent a highly diverse community with a wide range of cultural and language backgrounds. We are a Title One high-poverty K to 6th public school located in Philadelphia. The languages spoken by this diverse group of multilingual students, teachers, administrators, and parents include: Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, French, Hindi (India), Indonesian, Italian, Karen (Myanmar), Khmer (Cambodia), Korean, Laos, Malays, Chichewa (Malawi), Nepali, Pashto (Pakistan), Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, and other indigenous languages. In the 2021-2022 school year, we have an enrollment of 417 students with 43% female and 57% male, and about 40.8% Hispanic, 38.6% Asian, 9.6% White, 8.2% Black, and 2.9% Multi-Racial: that’s a total of 90.4% minority students.17 About 71.4% are English Language Learners (ELL), 5% had exited out of ELL services, and 15% are children of immigrants who are American-born (these students were never classified to receive ELL services, even though a language other than English is primarily spoken at home.)18 That’s an estimate of 90% of our student body is recent immigrants and/or children of immigrants. Due to the high percentage of multilingual learners, I rely a lot on hand-on activities, visual aids, and ELL strategies to make learning more meaningful and active for my students.
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