A Madison area charter school petitioned the Madison Metropolitan School Board Monday to allow the school to continue recruiting students through a dual-lottery process.
Nuestro Mundo is a dual language immersion school, with a mission to educate both native English and Spanish speaking students in a community which fosters equity and inclusion.
The school currently has a dual lottery system in which native English speakers and native Spanish speakers apply separately in order to ensure an equal number of each language in the Nuestro Mundo’s classrooms.
“The two lotteries are used to further Nuestro Mundo’s mission to get better results for our students and to bring two cultures together in a way that fosters equity and inclusion,” Nuestro Mundo Inc. Board President and parent Pamela McGilvery said at the public hearing.
The district’s policy requires charter schools to have one lottery system, however parents of Nuestro Mundo students pointed out, other MMSD public dual language schools use the same method.
Sixty-three parents signed a petition requesting that the school board waive Nuestro’s lottery requirement.
According to McGilvery, applicants for native Spanish speaking students were down this past school year, and a single lottery system would make it even more likely that Spanish speaking students continue to be in the minority.
“English heavy classrooms would rob spanish speakers of a golden opportunity to be the linguistic and cultural leaders, models and experts that they are,” said Kristen Scott. a fifth grade teacher at the school.
