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Lisa Trang wants something for her two children that she never had: fluency in both English and Vietnamese. Thanks to a program at Rose City Park Elementary School, she was getting that wish.
Trang, whose parents took refuge in the U.S. as Vietnamese boat people, grew up speaking Vietnamese but never learned to read or write the language, something she regrets to this day. She’s made it a goal to preserve her heritage and culture in her biracial kids, and knows Vietnamese is not an easy language to pick up. But the Northeast Portland elementary school has a Vietnamese Dual Language Immersion program, or VDLI, which entails 50-50 instruction in English and Vietnamese from two teachers with distinct specialties in each language.
It’s already paid off. “Everywhere I went, it was like, wow, your kids can speak Vietnamese. That’s so great,” Trang says. “I felt so prideful, like I’m actually doing something. My dad, he’s 70-something years old, for him to be able to see his grandkids speak Vietnamese, it’s something very important.”
But this year, something was missing in her son’s first grade classroom. His dual language program didn’t have two teachers, just one. And that teacher was fluent in only one language.
Amid a string of budget cuts and tight resources, Portland Public Schools assigned the first grade class of 30 students to one Vietnamese language teacher who, according to parents, expressed discomfort at the prospect of being the only instructor for the cohort. Little wonder: The teacher, Chau Vo, was hired to instruct in Vietnamese and has been left to, at times, instruct in English, which is not her native language.
The result is that students in the classroom aren’t receiving adequate English instruction. That’s particularly worrisome in first grade, widely considered a crucial year for students to pick up on foundational reading skills. Over the first two months of this school year, that’s translated into high stress for both the teacher and for the students in her class.
Parents’ efforts to rally the district into placing another teacher in the first grade program have so far produced few results. Many are concerned for their students’ academic outcomes, sitting with their 6- and 7-year-olds for hours at night over classwork that wasn’t completed during school. There are also social-emotional worries: Their young students are picking up on the stress, and not yet able to self-regulate.
“Last year, [Vo] just seemed like a different person,” says Erin Jones, a Rose City Park parent who, like Trang, has an older child in the second grade VDLI cohort and a younger child in the first grade class. “She’s showing signs of stress to the children, to the point where she has cried, she has gotten frustrated with them. She’s feeling overwhelmed, and I don’t blame her.”
Parents of students in the cohort harbor no resentment toward Vo; in fact, they appeared at her side at an Oct. 14 Portland School Board meeting as they delivered public testimony urging change. There, Vo explained through tears that her “overwhelming” workload has caused her long nights and anxiety, and that she’s been translating several curriculum materials into Vietnamese on her own time because they aren’t yet available through the district.
“It’s impossible for me to meet every child’s needs in this situation, no matter how hard I try,” Vo said at the Oct. 14 meeting. “The pressure…is taking a serious toll on my well-being as a professional and as a person. It is not just for me, the students are affected too.”
What’s happening at Rose City Park is just one consequence of the budgetary choices PPS is making as its finances are hamstrung by declining enrollment, rising labor costs, and pension obligations. The district has cut tens of millions out of its budgets since the 2022–23 school year: Last year, it had to climb out of a $40 million deficit by reducing staff positions and cutting back on some of its language access services, among other programs. It faces a similarly sized deficit this year.
District officials have yet to respond to WW’s questions regarding the dual language classroom. At the Oct. 14 meeting, Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong blamed the crunch on inadequate state funding, a long-standing frustration for district leaders.
“We have a resource issue that didn’t start here in Portland,” Armstrong said. “The more that we’re able to adequately fund schools to be able to offer the programs and address some of the things that we need to address, the better I think we’ll be.”
Vietnamese is not commonly taught in dual language programs nationwide, but the language is the third-most-commonly spoken one in Oregon, and has historically been popular in PPS. Tri To, a current board director of Hoi Phu Huynh, a nonprofit organization that supports VDLI in the Portland schools, says when executed well, dual language programs can have long-standing benefits for academic outcomes.
To’s sixth grader is one such example: He went through VDLI at Rose City Park and has displayed higher language proficiency in both languages, has excelled in mathematics, and is a top chess player in Oregon. To—who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam—considers it an ideal outcome.
To’s younger daughter is in the affected first grade class at Rose City Park, where he says a constant swirl of temporary remedies has made learning difficult. (An educational assistant assigned to the school comes to support the classroom periodically, and parents have been volunteering to assist the teacher.) But To says that when comparing his daughter’s first grade progress to that of his son’s, he notices some lags.
“You need one more teacher in a classroom, that will solve the problem,” he says, adding that the class’s struggles will have consequences for the entire school. “That educational assistant is supposed to support the whole school, and now you pull that into just one class, and these kids still don’t receive enough support, [now] the school lacks support too. That’s an even bigger problem.”
Parents, on the whole, have said district leaders have delivered inconsistent communications about next steps regarding the status of another teacher. At the Oct. 14 meeting, Armstrong told parents the district was aware that some additional support was needed and has assembled a team to look into the situation. (A solution was not provided at an Oct. 22 meeting parents attended.) The district has told parents that the class size of the VDLI cohort is not big enough to justify another teacher, though that is a matter of some dispute.
One parent chose not to wait for a resolution. Maddy Grandy took her son out of the VDLI classroom two weeks into the school year after he started crying to the point of throwing up. Her son is thriving in an English-only classroom, she says, but not without consequence.
“It’s such a valuable thing to have kids have an understanding that not everybody comes to the table with the same skills, the same background, the same cultural norms,” Grandy says. “That was such an invaluable piece of this.”
To says he doesn’t plan to remove his child from the VDLI program, worrying that if the cohort shrinks, the district will have further reason not to provide an additional staff member. But other parents say they aren’t yet sure what they might have to do if the problem drags on. Jones, who says her son tells her he’s not learning much from school and has taken it upon himself to make his teacher “feel better,” says she’s starting to feel that PPS is not looking out for the best interests of her students.
“People are leaving, and it’s because of the leadership, it’s because of the decisions that are being made and forced upon parents and students that don’t make a ton of sense,” Jones says. “I would probably look at private school, which I certainly don’t want to do, but I don’t trust that PPS has the best interest of my child.”
