Desegregation, overpopulation behind Duluth Spanish immersion expansion

DULUTH – The success of a Spanish immersion program at a Duluth elementary school means an expansion, forcing the transfer of 150 students next year and foreshadowing long-deferred boundary changes in the district of about 8,200 students.

Spanish immersion classes were first offered at centrally located Lowell Elementary in 2016. Since then, about 300 students have enrolled in the programming at the school, built for 500. This year, it serves nearly 650, in what has become “an untenably overcrowded situation,” Superintendent John Magas said at a recent meeting for families.

Over time, makeshift rooms have been built to accommodate growth. Traffic flowing in and out of school property has worsened, and some students who need special education can’t attend their neighborhood school with no room for their services.

Lowell Principal Eve Hessler said a new family enrolls at the elementary school weekly.

Seeing new housing projects open within the school’s boundaries “truly fills me with panic,” she said at the meeting. “We can’t make it work anymore.”

Nearly 500 apartments in that area opened recently, and Incline Village being built on the site of the former Central High School has the potential to add another 1,300.

Similar to Duluth’s former elementary magnet schools, Lowell’s Spanish and Ojibwe immersion programs were expected to help with the district’s desegregation efforts. The district’s Myers-Wilkins Elementary is where the students will transfer. That school has long been considered “racially identifiable” by the state education department, meaning Myers-Wilkins' population of students of color is much higher than the average in the district’s other elementary schools. And instead of Lowell’s immersion program addressing that problem, it worsened it.

Enrollment at Myers-Wilkins has shrunk by about 30% in the last decade, while increasing its percentage of students of color by 10%. Lowell doubled in size, and its number of students of color slightly decreased. The school enrolls more than 200 transfers from several Duluth elementary schools. District leaders expect that offering Spanish at Myers-Wilkins will alleviate segregation concerns and give more students a chance to enroll in the popular programming.

Magas, who speaks Spanish himself, said he’d eventually like to offer the immersion program at schools beyond Lowell and Myers-Wilkins, and is also interested in adding an environmental program.

What the district offers academically is part of the boundary discussion, he said, but he also wants to ensure that students are offered equal opportunities, no matter their means.

“It’s not fair to just give additional advantage to students who are quite often already set up for success,” Magas said.

Dozens of parents protested the transfer plan when the district announced it without warning earlier this month. Several at the family meeting shared concerns about separating friend groups and putting kids who endured the pandemic together through the trauma of a new school. Where students live will determine whether they change schools. Some parents said they would open-enroll their kids at Myers-Wilkins just to keep friends together.

Assistant Superintendent Anthony Bonds told families he’s denied many transfers to Lowell, but it’s no longer enough.

“We’ve built a strong program and we are able to replicate it at another location,” he said, which is “the right thing,” despite its challenges.

Chad McKenna’s Lowell third-grader will transfer to Myers-Wilkins next year. While parents were caught off-guard, he said, it’s clear that change is needed.

“It is going to require us to do things that we never planned on doing, and to pay attention to things that a lot of us have had the privilege of ignoring for a long time,” McKenna said. “That’s going to be hard, but desegregated schools are better for everybody — not just these kids or those kids — but for everybody and for our community.”

Lowell is just one of Duluth’s overstuffed schools. The district plans to hire a consultant soon to begin a boundary study, as it has in the past. Boundaries were last changed in 2009, amid a lengthy $315 million school closure and consolidation plan.