Oyster Bilingual School

James F. Oyster Elementary School, a public elementary school located in the Woodley Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was built in 1926 as a 10-class-room school to accommodate 240 students. By the late 1960s, it was a school in decline, serving a predominantly White population that was aging and/or moving to the surrounding suburbs of Maryland. Importantly, its attendance zone stretched deep into the heart of the Adams Morgan neighborhood, which, in the late 1960s became the center of the expanding Hispanic community of Washington. This demographic change accelerated in 1965, when U.S. immigration laws were amended to increase the number of immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. Washington, D.C., became a port of entry for working-class immigrants from Central America, due to the immigration reforms of the 1960s. Prior to the Immigration Reform and Control Act, the Hispanic community of Washington had consisted mainly of professionals working in city, state, and federal governments and international agencies.

With the influx of large numbers of poorer Hispanic immigrants who settled into the Adams Morgan area, the number of Hispanic students enrolled in the D.C. Public Schools increased. Soon tensions rose, and subsequently there were even riots.

Using the 1960s “Great Society” rhetoric of President Lyndon Johnson's administration, which stressed the importance of education, grassroots leaders directed the energy and goals of the emerging Hispanic community toward improved education services. In June 1969, the District of Columbia Manpower Office funded Project Adelante, designed to teach English to adults. Hispanic leaders in the city also called for an elementary-level bilingual school that would serve both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking students. They believed that a bilingual program for both groups, working together to learn each other's languages, would create in the school a microcosm of the community that would benefit the entire city.

Federal funds were sought and obtained through a project called “Model Schools.” These funds provided teacher training for 20 native Spanish-speaking teachers selected to meet certification requirements for D.C. Public Schools. These teachers were charged with the responsibility for designing an integrated two-way bilingual school emphasizing language learning in a multiracial, multicultural environment; and together with community leaders, they were charged with [Page 639]“selling” the program to the community. In the spring of 1971, after 2 years, the D.C. Public School Superintendent responded to community requests by proposing to use local funds to pay for the teaching and staff salaries of a bilingual school. The Ford Foundation provided a grant for curriculum development and program evaluation.

The existing Oyster Elementary School was selected as the ideal site to implement a two-way bilingual program for all its students. The reasons for selecting this school were that its student population had the highest number and percentage of Hispanic students in the city and the total school program would be small enough to test the educational model.

In the fall of 1971, Oyster School launched its two-way bilingual program for all its students. After the first year of the program, the student population began to grow, due to the influx of more Central Americans into the Adams Morgan neighborhood. By 1973, the student population was well over the capacity of the school, with students numbering beyond 300. The school became known unofficially as “Oyster Bilingual Elementary School.”

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