Immigrant influx to Chicago suburbs spawns foreign language schools for kidsBy Russell Working , Chicago Tribune staff reporter January 4, 2010
Art and Maria Guelis are well-educated Russians who speak their native language at home, read Tolstoy and Dostoevski and watch Internet TV programs out of Moscow. But their 7-year-old son, George, always answers his parents in English.
Determined to pass on their linguistic heritage, the Guelises recently adopted a time-honored immigrant strategy that is burgeoning in Chicago's suburbs. They enrolled him in Saturday language classes in addition to his public schooling.
George attends a Russian school in Naperville, one of scores of weekend foreign language schools springing up in houses of worship and cultural centers as migration from Chicago and the high-tech industry in DuPage County bring a polyglot populace to the suburbs.
While embracing English as essential in America, these parents are striving to keep their own languages alive in their family for another generation. But history shows they face an uphill battle.  "We want our kids to be able to talk to their grandfathers and grandmothers," said Art Guelis, a nuclear chemist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They live in Russia and they don't speak English well enough to talk to their grandchildren."
The schools are diverse in the metropolitan region, which has a growing foreign-born population. At the time of the 2000 U.S. census, the five collar counties were home to 474,000 people who spoke a language other than English at home, and 46 percent of those born abroad had arrived in the last decade.
"There is such a diversity to the suburbs these days," said Rev. Chris Groh, pastor of Holy Cross Parish in Joliet, which in 2006 opened a Friday afternoon school to teach an influx of Polish-speaking children who have arrived in the last six years. "It's not like it used to be."
Similar schools are serving many immigrant children. Chinese-American children are learning to pen characters in Naperville, while Indian children are studying Tamil in Aurora. Ukrainian youngsters conjugate verbs in their parents' and grandparents' language at a cultural center in Palatine, and Polish schools are flourishing throughout the region.
Old model has staying power
Virtually every immigrant group around a century ago opened language schools, usually on the weekend and sometimes every day after public school lessons were finished, said Melissa Klapper, a professor at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. Then, as now, the schools often emphasized dance, culture and faith.
"I do think they had some success as a counterbalance against Americanization forces from the outside," Klapper said. "But in terms of teaching the language, they were almost all failures."
Xilin Asian Community Center started a Chicago school in 1989 that grew into eight independent schools offering Chinese classes to 2,000 students around the region, said Xilin executive director Linda Yang. Xilin's Naperville center, including the school and social service groups, expanded from a weekend-only program to seven days a week in 2003.
Many students are drawn from the families of Chinese working in the high-tech industry, Yang said.
Parents are enthusiastic about the classes, but many immigrant children complain that they have to attend six days of school a week, unlike their friends.
Max Bernadsky, 11, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian who lives in Oak Park, envies his friends who don't have to spend a precious weekend day heading over to Russian Sunday School in Skokie. "I just hate the feeling of waking up early and having to go to the school that is far away," Max said.
Such complaints are familiar to immigrant parents. Not long ago, Yang tried to put things in perspective by posting a notice telling students that their counterparts in China were in class 260 days a year, compared with roughly 180 days or fewer in the U.S.
"Kids kept complaining," she said, "so we posted that number saying, 'See? This is what your cousins are doing in China. If you want to catch up, you have to have more days.'"
About 36 Polish schools offer classes in 45 branches around the metropolitan region every Saturday, said Helena Ziolkowska, Chicago-based president of the Polish Teachers Association in America. These schools provide language, religion and cultural classes to more than 16,500 students.
Many Polish immigrants are mobile, and they tend to move to the suburbs as soon as they establish themselves.
"The schools simply go after children," Ziolkowska said. "Most of the time it works that way. There is a group of parents and they decide it is too far to drive their children 40 to 50 miles to Polish school."
Often a history of persecution heightens the sense that the survival of a language over the generations is a sacred trust. This was the case for Ukrainians after Stalin's forced famine in the 1930s.
"It made individuals much more determined to remember, and not just remember, but to celebrate who we are and why we survived," said Anna Chychula, secretary for a Palatine branch of the American Ukrainian Youth Association, which has a weekend school that teaches the language to about 100 students from kindergarten to 8th grade.
In Aurora, the Sri Venkateswara Swami Temple of Greater Chicago, a temple that largely serves immigrants from southern India, offers courses in languages largely spoken in that region: Tamil and Telegu. About 30 children study each language on weekends.
"For Indian kids, until they go to school, it's usually OK," said Azad Sunkavalli, a temple spokesman. "But after that, they start switching to all English. ... I have two grandkids, and their mother is complaining, 'They're never talking in Telegu now.'"
Expanding locations
Naperville's Russian center is only one of a number of Saturday schools in the area, but it opened this year because most are centered in Skokie and the northern suburbs, said Maria Polski, one of the organizers. So co-founder Irina Koshelev e-mailed everyone with a Russian-sounding last name at Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratory, which have large numbers of foreign scientists and technicians on staff.
Now the school has about 40 children attending Saturdays. In a music class recently, piano teacher Yuliya Mangoutova showed children a picture of composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky and played a selection from one of his compositions, about a forest witch well known in Russian lore, Baba Yaga.
When she asked children in Russian, "What would we say to Baba Yaga?" one answer illustrated the problem that immigrant parents face.
A boy answered, "My sister said, 'Don't talk to strangers.'" He began in Russian, but had to finish in English.
Polski said retaining the parents' language is a matter of perseverance, not just schooling.
"They have to stick to their guns. They have to bring in literature and movies and conversation," Polski said. "If the parents work full time and can't be bothered, then Saturday school alone is not going to do it." ---------- |
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