When you walk inside the Oyster school, you see a big banner from the Department of Education hanging from the ceiling in commemoration of the school’s No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon award, which the school received in 2006 for its outstanding test scores. Bulletin boards display student projects, featuring work half in English, half in Spanish. On the loudspeaker, a woman makes an announcement in Spanish. There is no translation. A few minutes later, another voice makes a different announcement in English.
As a bilingual, dual-immersion language school, every classroom at Oyster has two teachers – one is a native-English speaker and the other a native-Spanish speaker. The focus is not on teaching kids how to conjugate verbs in each language. Rather, students learn all subjects simultaneously in both languages.
Georgetown’s own Billy Byers (COL ’10) attended the James F. Oyster Bilingual Elementary School in affluent Woodley Park, a school where Hispanic students are in the majority while whites and blacks the minority. A defender on Georgetown’s soccer team, Byers grew up playing soccer with Latino kids and routinely heard the call, “Gringo, pásame la bola.”
Though his father is British and his mother Australian, Byers is bilingual in a conversational way – he’s not an expert on the rules of the language – with imperfect knowledge of when to use the appropriate verb tense.
Billy is reserved at first – both his father and sister say he’s not very expressive. But when he talked to me about the annual Fiesta that happens at Oyster around Cinco de Mayo, he had a big smile, and got nostalgic.
“We had some amazing piñatas,” he said.
Billy talked about the Latin music and people dressed in indigenous outfits – some people even brought Chihuahuas. There was a flea market to raise money for the school. Families that were better off, such as the Byers, would donate clothes to the flea market, and immigrant families would buy them, he said.
Oyster gave Billy and his sister Amy (SFS ’08) more than just a second language, which is valuable in itself in Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights, areas with the highest proportion of Hispanics in the District, according to NeighborhoodInfo D.C. Billy recalls using Spanish in the stores of Mt. Pleasant and Adams Morgan, many of whose proprietors didn’t speak much English.
Besides becoming bilingual, Oyster has helped Billy and his sister develop friendships with people of different backgrounds. Students exposed to bilingual education tend to develop more diverse friendships, according to Katarina Brito, the Bilingual Program Developer for the District of Colombia Public Schools, and an Oyster parent herself.
Billy and Amy’s closest friends are still from Oyster. Amy’s best friend is half Uruguayan. Billy’s best friend is Ben Lagos, a half Peruvian freshman at Temple University – by Lagos’ account, he and Billy were the two best players on the soccer field at Oyster.
They were able to maintain a diverse group of friends when they went on to Deal Junior High School and Woodrow Wilson High School, two schools that attract many Oyster graduates. These schools’ lunch rooms had more cliques and greater racial segregation.
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The Oyster School is not what one would expect from a D.C. public school. Just up Cleveland Avenue are some of the nicest houses in the District. On the corner of Cleveland and Calvert Streets, on the brick façade behind wide, white columns reads “Oyster Bilingual School.” Under it, in equally large letters, reads “Escuela Bilingue Oyster.”
But bilingualism is a merely a road to an open mind, according to sixth grade teacher Eduardo Gamarra – whom Ben Lagos calls the “wise man” of the school. One of the oldest teachers at Oyster, the native Peruvian sports a full salt and pepper beard and thinning hair, with large glasses encapsulating his droopy eyes.
“Two languages are a road to arrive at tolerance and a culture of academic excellence,” he said slowly in Spanish, merging his palms.
The walls of his classroom are decorated with pictures of Latin American novelists like Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Horacio Quiroga, not the usual American images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
“I believe in education as liberation … I give my students extra-credit for criticizing me … Here, everyone says what they think. In Latin America, they can’t,” said Gamarra.
What Amy remembers most about Gamarra is learning about the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or Juan Salvador Gaviota, as told in Gamarra’s classroom. The story is about a seagull who doesn’t conform to his flock.
It was in Gamarra’s classroom that Amy and Billy were exposed to Latin American thinkers and political movements. In his class, they learned about the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet. Amy had a friend at Oyster whose father was black-listed by the government of the Chilean dictator.
“You don’t realize it when you’re there, but they’re radical teachers,” Billy said.
Their father and Associate Director of the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown, Stephen Byers, said that the family’s favorite band is now-defunct Rage Against the Machine – a radical rock band that supports the National Liberation Army of Zapata.
At Georgetown, both Byers offspring are passionate about Latin American politics. At her high school graduation, Amy was announced as “Amy Zapatista Byers.” She has written numerous papers at Georgetown about NAFTA and the Chiapan movement and has traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, twice, the first time to help make sustainable, safe stoves for a community there.
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It is no secret that the D.C. school system is weak. Though performance varies greatly, in 2005-2006 only 36 percent of all DCPS and public charter school students tested at a proficient or advanced level in reading, according to a report by D.C. Kids Count.
Oyster’s test scores are much better in both reading and math. Compared to all other elementary schools in D.C., the school’s test scores place it in the top 10th percentile in both reading and math, according to the school’s 2006 No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon application.
Oyster is an anomaly in D.C. because it’s a high-performing school where white students are in the minority. Of the school’s 433 students, just over half are Hispanic, one third are white and about ten percent are black, though the school maintains a 50-50 balance of native Spanish-speaking and native-English speaking students. As a public school, it accepts all students within its boundaries, which encompass the area around Adams Morgan and Woodley Park. In order to achieve an even language split, it takes in a number of out-of-zone students each year.
“Most of the schools in D.C. struggle. Most of the high-performing schools are almost all white,” said Carlos Eng-Garcia, a half-Cuban, half-Korean father with two kids at the school. Oyster’s programs, faculty and test scores seem to shatter this stereotype.
Brito said that the academic benefits of bilingual education have been proved, including the capacity to improve “cognitive flexibility.” But Oyster’s education model is not the only reason that Oyster has been able to overcome the odds of a troubled school system. A core of extremely active parents who strongly believe in Oyster help keep it thriving.
Like other schools in the District, Oyster is constricted by what Oyster parent Jill Brescia-Weiler calls a “lack of systemic support” from DCPS. Like many Oyster parents, Brescia-Weiler is an activist. She works for Teaching for Change, an organization that has worked to improve the conditions of D.C. schools; other Oyster parents advocate for immigrants’ rights.
Brescia-Weiler says that what makes a difference in D.C. schools is “parents with resources. [Principal] Marta [Guzmán] says she wants a music teacher and things get done,” Brescia-Weiler said.
Lagos believes that the reason that some parents are so attracted and committed to Oyster is because they can save money and still provide their children with a great education.
“White people trying to make it a private school without paying for it. It’s right around the corner, why not make it good?” Lagos said.
When asked about making the choice between Oyster and a private school, Steve Brescia-Weiler responded that Oyster’s lower cost played a role, but that he and Jill also believe in public schools as something that society should provide.
Oyster parents even saved the school from being shut down.
DCPS proposed to close the school in 1993 because it had become run-down and overcrowded. To preserve the school, then-Oyster parent Mary Filardo founded the 21st Century School Fund. Working with committed parents and the principal, Filardo convinced DCPS to enter into a public-private partnership, relinquishing land to a for-profit company in exchange for the construction of the new Oyster school. The deal didn’t cost the government anything. In 2001, Oyster became the first new school constructed in the District of Colombia Public School System in over 20 years.
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Amy and Billy grew up just east of Rock Creek Park, in a nice house that is now a $1 million dollar home, according to their father. Historically, Rock Creek Park was a major divide, with an affluent, mostly white population to its west, including Georgetown, and a poorer, minority population to its east. They lived on a predominately upper-middle class black street; in 1987, when they moved in, they were the only white family on the street, Byers said.
In their home, the Byers accepted Oyster’s immigrant families. The parents of one of Billy’s closest friends at Oyster didn’t speak English but Dr. Byers and his wife became close with them. A Salvadorian family stayed with the Byers for a year while their mother searched for her husband, who had gone missing in El Salvador, according to Dr. Byers.
Dr. Byers said that he and his wife wanted to send their children to a school that reflected the diversity of the city, especially the culturally and ethnically diverse areas of Mt. Pleasant and Adams Morgan.
“We are wealthy enough to provide them with a private school education but we chose not to,” Byers said. “They’re probably not the normal children of faculty that go [to Georgetown]. Lynn and I made an effort to expose them to the culture of Washington, not the culture of Montgomery County.”
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Anybody who moves into the school’s neighborhood is allowed to attend Oyster, but out-of-boundary parents have to compete to enroll their children at the school. Parents used to sleep on the sidewalks for three days in January to get their children in – even teachers, including art teacher Carole Whelan, had to do the same. About three years ago, Oyster switched to an electronic lottery system to admit out-of-boundary students, but competition is still intense. A couple immigrating from New Zealand to Washington moved into the school’s zone because they wanted their children to enroll at Oyster.
“The school is, like, overcrowded … People are coming in and we can’t say no to them … it’s crazy because there should be a limit,” said Magaly Gatti, a Peruvian mother of two children at Oyster who lives out of boundary, in Capitol Hill.
But the influx of parents into Oyster from inside the school’s boundaries is less Hispanic than it used to be, Principal Marta Guzmán said.
“I don’t feel good about the gentrification of Adams Morgan…the Hispanic population can no longer afford to live there,” said Guzmán.
Since 2000, the neighborhoods of Mt. Pleasant, Adams-Morgan, Colombia Heights and Shaw have seen the fastest increase in housing prices in D.C., according to Marge Turner, the Director of the Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy at the Urban Institute. While it is almost certain that some poorer families have been pushed out, the numbers are hard to measure, she added.
Because of the influx of white families replacing native-Spanish speaking families in the neighborhood, Oyster has to accept increasingly more native-Spanish speaking families from other areas of D.C. to maintain its traditional 50-50 split between English and Spanish speakers. To accommodate its growing student body, Oyster is expanding into a middle school – adding seventh and eight grades by annexing a defunct school.
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Far and away from school politics, in art teacher Carole Whelan’s classroom on Tuesday, fifth graders worked on self-portraits made out of construction paper. I asked them what they liked about Oyster. Among the responses were having two teachers in each classroom, a great playground and the Fiesta.
Across the table, Sohrab Pasikhani, an African-American boy, stood up on his chair and yelled, “We have a huge library with Spanish and English and Korean books.”
Zoe Gatti, a daughter or Paraguayan and Peruvian parents, disagreed.
“I’ll bet you 5 dollars we have Korean books,” he persisted.
“No, I’ll bet you a quarter,” she responded.
Whelan teaches art with influences from Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Oyster parents come from all over the world, so 12 different languages are represented among the school’s students.
“We are a school of many colors … everyone is together … they are in a marvelous mix,” Gamarra said.
