Merrick should say, 'Yes to FLES!'

I’m disappointed.

Very disappointed.

The Merrick Elementary School District’s superintendent, Dr. Dominick Palma, has proposed eliminating the district’s Spanish language program, which the district offered along with French in the 1970s before it cut foreign language because of budget pressures. Spanish was finally reinstated in 2006.

I live in Merrick. My children attended Levy-Lakeside Elementary School, where I was involved in the PTA for a number of years.

In 2003, the Bellmore School District started a Spanish language program. The Herald did stories on it. I quickly realized that the Merrick children who attended Levy-Lakeside and some who went to Birch would go to Kennedy High School with Bellmore Elementary District students who had studied Spanish from a very young age. At the time, Merrick children received no foreign-language instruction until they got to Merrick Avenue Middle School.

So I protested. I collected petition signatures with fellow Levy-Lakeside parents Al Belbol and Elisa Kandel. I spoke at meetings. I wrote columns.

People started listening and worrying.

Current Merrick Board of Education Vice President Gina Piskin was then a co-president of the Levy-Lakeside PTA, which took up the cause of bringing Spanish to the Merrick district.

The argument was simple: Merrick children would be unable to keep up with their Bellmore peers during Spanish classes when they reached Kennedy, unless the Merrick district acted quickly to institute its own Foreign Language in the Elementary School program. Essentially, Merrick had some catching up to do.

The Levy-Lakeside PTA’s statement to the Board of Education read, in part, “As a PTA, we fear that our children will be relegated to second-class status in Spanish classes. They will either be unable to compete with their Bellmore peers if they are placed in the same Spanish classes, or they will be segregated into beginning classes while the Bellmore students receive advanced training.”