McKinley Primary Center in South Bend, Indiana is a one-story building made of brick and reinforced by the devotion and compassion of the staff members who make the place, in many ways, a second home for both staff and students.
“We’re like siblings,” laughed third grade teacher Ron Ward, “We’ll be all huggy one second and the next we’re like ‘ugh.’ But we always stick together.”
McKinley has a very diverse student population, majorly attributed to the influx of international students and professors in the area whose children attend the school.
“I arrived at McKinley four years ago,” said school administrator Nicole Smith. “The one thing that struck me immediately was how diverse the population of students was at that time. We had life skill students and then we also had refugees from the middle east, and then we had several families from Bosnia, China, and Korea, and as well as our students that may be here from Mexico or Latin American and South American countries.”
Led by Principal Jesus Pedraza and his desire to give back to his own Latino community, McKinley Primary has introduced a Dual Language Immersion program for two kindergarten classes this year. Roughly half of the students are native Spanish speakers, and the other half are native English speakers.
The plan is to continue this dual language program for the current kindergarteners as they get older, and add two more kindergarten classes each year. In four years, the entire primary center will have DLI classes for each grade.
“It’s always been a diverse culture here,” said Smith, “and that is one of the things that I love about McKinley and still love about McKinley.”
Alexis Daugherty 