As someone who moved to the U.S. not knowing how to speak English, Nelly Reyes de Schonborn said she identifies with students every day in her work at Birchwood Elementary.
“What I tell them is this: ‘I learned English as an older lady. You’re going to be able to learn it because you’re so young,’” she said. “It makes me feel so proud to see kids after they come in fifth grade, and I see them in middle school later on — they’re speaking like nobody’s business.”
Schonborn has worked as a multilingual learner (MLL) specialist for six years, and she helps more than 80 students learn English, improve fluency and ultimately find success in the classroom.
She is one of 16 specialists and five paraeducators who work with students one-on-one, meet with families and aid teachers to support the growth and education of the Bellingham Public Schools’ multilingual students. The district estimates that more than 50 languages are spoken by its students, collectively, with the most prevalent being Spanish, Vietnamese, Punjabi, Russian and Ukrainian.
The road to the work and support she provides to multilingual students was neither short nor easy.
“I didn’t want to get to a point where I would see my kids speaking English with somebody else, and then I wouldn’t understand what they were saying.”
— Nelly Reyes de Schonborn
Schonborn grew up in an aldea, a small village, in Guatemala. By the sixth grade, she knew her dream was to become a teacher, stemming from her desire to serve her local community. She finished school and became a teacher at just 18, despite caring for her two young sisters following the death of her mother.
At 21, she met her husband, a Peace Corps volunteer from the U.S., and they married three years later. After welcoming their first of three children, they moved their family to the U.S., a place and a culture Schonborn didn’t know.
“I didn’t even think of it up until I got here, and I was like, ‘Chihuahua … I don’t know English,'” she said. “I didn’t want to get to a point where I would see my kids speaking English with somebody else, and then I wouldn’t understand what they were saying.”
She said she could read English and understand parts of conversations, but she couldn’t speak or, more importantly, express herself. So she began taking classes at the local school district.
In 2004, the family settled in Ferndale and fell in love with the community. Schonborn spent seven years attending Whatcom Community College — “one of my favorite places in the whole world,” she said — while she improved her English and raised her children.
She initially pursued a degree in nursing because she underestimated her capacity to teach with English being her second language. When she shared her dream of teaching with others, they would make “the face” — one of doubt.
When she couldn’t get into the nursing program due to a long waiting list, she transferred to Western Washington University and was accepted into the Woodring College of Education, re-realizing her childhood dream. After graduating, she was hired as a multilingual specialist and Spanish teacher at Birchwood.
Bellingham Public Schools recorded 1,016 MLL students — or 8.8% of their student body — for the 2023–24 school year, according to the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The count is up from 6.2% in the 2014–15 school year.
With the increase in need, school districts have expanded their MLL programs.
Schonborn joined the district after a period of restructuring. Amy Carder, the district’s director of teaching and learning for the Multilingual Learner Program, said the district did a comprehensive review of the system, focusing on the seven schools with the most multilingual students.
The review found that the program was severely understaffed, Carder said. In the past, paraeducators covered the needs of the many multilingual students, but the review resulted in the creation of the Multilingual Learner Specialist position, a position requiring a degree.
In the review, the district also recognized the need to train teachers to support MLL students in the classroom, not just pull the students out of class for one-on-one instruction. The goal was integration and further inclusion for the students as they learned English.
“It was a shift from thinking about just directly serving the students themselves to working with people within the system; particularly classroom teachers on, how do you make content comprehensible for students in your classroom?” Carder said.
“What I let teachers know is that they have to keep in mind that learning a language doesn’t happen one day to the next, or from one year to the next. It takes years,” Schonborn said. “Especially for the kids, the academic language, that one is the one that takes the longest. They are worrying so much about getting the social language to communicate with other kids.”
Hailey Hoffman is a CDN visual journalist; reach her at haileyhoffman@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 103.
