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Team members include (from left) Corinna Hooge, director of Special Programs and Grants; Andrea Hojnacki, first grade teacher; April Walters, third grade teacher at the intermediate school; Carmen Andrews, second grade teacher, and kindergarten teacher Kerry Hoffman.
In 2022, under the leadership of administrator Corinna Hooge, School #5 in Dunkirk City Schools (DCS) launched an innovative program called One-Way Dual Language Bilingual Education 50/50.
The model of bilingual education enrolls elementary students who are fluent in Spanish and who are learning English and teaches 50 percent of the curriculum in Spanish and 50 percent of the curriculum in English.
Elementary students enrolled in Dunkirk’s Bilingual Education program stay in a cohort across several years, and they develop literacy in both languages simultaneously. Bilingual Education has been around in public schools since the 1960s, and these programs are embedded in Second Language Acquisition theories, focusing on improved academic achievement and developing more than one language at the same time. An important outcome of the program is biliteracy – students can read and write (and speak and comprehend) in both languages at a young age.
In 2024, DCS’s One-Way Bilingual program was highlighted on the Erie Niagara School Superintendent Associations Podcast as an innovative regional program. The academic and linguistic gains of the students enrolled in this initial bilingual program are impressive. Students in bilingual programs regularly outperform their peers in monolingual education settings on standardized tests in the content and language areas, among other benefits.
The teachers of the program are required to have a valid N.Y.S. Bilingual Extension, issued by the New York State Department of Education (NYSED); SUNY Fredonia TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages) offers the teacher preparation program (AC: BLE) leading to this extension.
All of the current certified Bilingual teachers at DCS are graduates of the SUNY Fredonia AC: BLE. The program will expand through the grade levels as more teachers become bilingually certified. Danielle Russell is the principal of School #5.
The SUNY Fredonia Advanced Certificate: Bilingual Education (AC:BLE) is an 18-credit hour graduate program in TESOL, housed within the Department of Education. The program was written during 2010 by Drs. Karen Lillie and Kate Mahoney and is currently coordinated by Dr. Lacey Golaszewski. They wrote it specifically to try to build capacity of certified bilingual teachers in Chautauqua County. In addition, offering a bilingual program in DCS allowed the district to be more in compliance with Commissioner Regulation (CR) Part 154.
Starting in the current school year, a Two-Way Bilingual Education program replaced the One Way, as DCS #5 has become a whole-school Bilingual Academy. The 2025/26 bilingual kindergarten is following a Two-Way model. The new Two-Way model allows for more sections of the bilingual program, and the Two-Way program expands to include English speakers who want to learn Spanish. All students become biliterate: the Spanish speakers learn English as a New Language (ENL) and the English speakers learn Spanish as a New Language (SNL). DCS is offering Two-Way Bilingual Education as an innovative program to promote biliteracy and increase academic achievement, and SUNY Fredonia TESOL is continuing to have a part in this effort.
