( Sarah L. Voisin / THE WASHINGTON POST ) - David Colon of Puerto Rico teaches at Beltsville Academy. He’s working on his English, and his students help him. Colon is “great at communicating with parents, and the kids love him,” the principal says.
Colon, 29, has small eyes, slick black hair, pale skin and animated hands. His students have taught him some good lingo — among his favorites, “Don’t go there!” He can read and write in English, but his tongue speeds through a Spanglish blend.
“My mother, her English: excellent. My father, excellent,” Colon said. “Pero me, eh, regular.”
A friend helped him translate this point: “I try to tell the kids that my English is limited, so I hope you don’t judge me. In this class, we don’t judge each other — we help each other.’’
Most of the region’s large school systems say they could use a little help in the recruiting.
In Montgomery and Prince William counties, about one out of every four students is Hispanic. But the share among teachers is one in 20. In Fairfax County, the gap is 20 percent (students) to 3 percent (teachers).
In the District and Anne Arundel County, the gaps are much smaller.
Schools have long faced racial, ethnic and other imbalances in the teacher workforce. Prince George’s has been relatively successful at recruiting black teachers by marketing itself as one of the country’s best-known centers of black affluence. Half of its teachers are black, more than five times the national average.
The system benefits from a pipeline of black alumni who return to teach. There is no pipeline among Hispanics yet.
For out-of-town hiring, competition is stiff. School systems comb through the private sector, looking for professionals in search of a higher purpose. They battle at job fairs at Hispanic-serving colleges.
In the last year alone, a dozen systems visited Florida International University, a Hispanic-serving institution in Miami, according to its dean, Delia Garcia. But a place such as Prince George’s can be a hard sell for students who have no roots in the county.
“We tend to be a family-based group and want to remain close to our families,” Garcia said.
Colon came to Prince George’s because he had roots here. When his health-education position in Puerto Rico was cut in 2009, his godmother — a teacher at Charles H. Flowers High School — referred him.
He took an exam to demonstrate proficiency for teaching Spanish. The questions were in English, and he responded in Spanish.
Last school year, Beltsville Principal Rashida Edwards invited him to teach Spanish. She has 80 teachers on staff, but she can count on one hand the number who speak the language.
An interpreter helps Colon speak with parents who don’t know Spanish. Like some parents, he also has discovered the challenge of dealing with a central office that doesn’t understand him.
“He’s been a jewel to the school,” Edwards said. “He’s great at communicating with parents, and the kids love him.”
In the hallway between classes, Hispanic students give Colon hugs and fist bumps and share stories.
“I got a new pollo at home,” Ashley Recinos, a sixth-grader who is lobbying to be in his class next year, tells him about her pet chicken. “He’s so cute. But he broke his pata,” she said, pointing to the back of her ankle.
“A real chicken? Here?’’ asked Colon, shocked that the pet could withstand four seasons. “Oy, hace frio” — it’s cold.
In an eighth-grade class, he teaches nine native Spanish speakers the finer points of reading and writing in the language. They teach him, too.
“Es un beso,” an eighth-grader says, pointing to a tear-dropped candy wrapped in silver foil.
“No,” Colon corrected. “Es chocolate.”
“No, in English,” the student said. “They call this candy a ‘Kiss.’ ”
“Oh.”
Another recent day, a sixth-grader pulled Colon aside. The student said his family was undocumented, and he was terrified that police would take him away.
Colon had a ready answer.
“Don’t worry about that,” the teacher said. “Focus on your class and your [grade point average] and don’t waste the opportunity that your parents have given to you to learn here. People with good GPAs get help.”
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