MOUNT VERNON — Oscar Delgado picked at his tostada as he sat between his father, Juan, and his cousin, Kassandra Delgado.

Oscar, 7, attends first grade at Madison Elementary School’s dual-language program, now ending its first year.

He doesn’t speak English well, but he is learning, Kassandra said.

“He is really intelligent,” said the 12-year-old, who attends Centennial Elementary. “I had to learn from scratch, and he’s doing a lot better.”

She translated for Juan Delgado during Madison’s annual Fiesta Mexicana last month, a community celebration of the school’s students and their families.

Delgado said the classes help Oscar retain his culture and language while learning English.

“It’s very good because the kids are learning to talk in Spanish and in English,” Delgado said.

Students learn about customs from many cultures throughout the year in dual-language classes. This past year, about 90 students in kindergarten and first grade spent half of their day in an English classroom studying math. The other half of the day is taught in Spanish, where students learn social studies and science. Reading and writing is taught in each student’s native language.

Principal Evelyn Morse said she is pleasantly surprised at the students’ progress.

“We expected kids to be more in the silent stage at this point,” she said. “But they’re understanding pretty much everything that’s being asked of them, and they’re communicating in their second language, English or Spanish.”

The school spent three years planning for the dual-language curriculum, Morse said.

She was a teacher at West View Elementary in Burlington 11 years ago. Back then, West View was a popular school to attend, she said. But when Bay View Elementary opened in 1992, many families left for the new school.

West View Principal Meagan Dawson said families are now returning to the beleaguered school. She said that’s because of the school’s dual-language program, now finishing its fourth year.

“West View has never had a waiting list before,” Dawson said. “We have Bay View teachers’ kids coming here and Bay View families whose older kids attend Bay View, but their younger kids are in the dual-language program.”

Dawson’s own daughter will attend West View’s dual-language program this fall.

“She has 10 Spanish words memorized,” Dawson said. “She thinks she’ll slide right into it.”

Morse and Dawson trade ideas throughout the school year, they both said.

Dawson laughs when people call her a dual-language expert.

“We have to come up with it as we go,” she said.

During Fiesta Mexicana, which was held in mid-May, parents watched as their children danced traditional dances from the northern region of Mexico. Parent Amparo Sanchez spent days teaching the kids the dance moves. Other parents pitched in their time to alter the traditional dresses and blouses.

The fiesta has been a tradition at Madison for at least 10 years, said bilingual educator Francisca Gallegos, who is retiring this year. She said people now see Madison in a different light.

“I think the community is more aware of our school, and they don’t see it as a negative anymore,” she said. “They see it as a school that’s really trying to respect the cultures and the language of the community.”

By the numbers, Madison Elementary is considered a failure under federal guidelines. For the past three years, the school has not met targets under the No Child Left Behind Act.

But many parents looked beyond the veil of statistics. Ioana Paulat said she didn’t want her children attending Madison at first.

“I was very, very ambivalent” she said of putting her 7-year-old son, Max, in the program. “The school has horrible scores.”

But when she heard Madison had a dual-language program, she paused and remembered her own experience as a Romanian growing up in Germany.

“In Germany, I had the same issues that Mexicans have here,” Paulat said. “I know what it feels like. I see the parallels.”

One year later, she’s a firm believer in the program. Her daughter, Anna, will attend the dual-language kindergarten next year. Paulat, a linguist, said she sees her children speaking Spanish all their lives.

“I hope people look beyond the demographics,” Paulat said. “Madison is a poor school, but it’s a poor school because people run away from it.”

One of the nation’s first dual-language programs started in Florida in the 1960s, teaching Spanish and English to elementary children. Today, 334 programs in 28 states teach a dual-language curriculum. Most schools pair English with Spanish, but some teach students Navajo, German and Korean, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics.

Madison Principal Morse said students in the dual-language classes are getting the same education as students in mainstream classes.

“The byproduct is you’re bilingual at the end of sixth grade,” Morse said. “My guess is they’ll be able to dream in their second language.”

In Melody Young’s dual-language kindergarten class, students play at different work stations for part of the day. Jerzee Pigford and Naomie Perez, both 6, worked on their writing. Jerzee carefully wrote one word, then put her finger on the paper as a spacer and wrote the second word in her Spanish sentence.

“I learned Spanish from Dora the Explorer,” Jerzee said before class.

Kindergarten teacher Linda Reneé said students are grouped in bilingual pairs, one who speaks English at home and another who speaks Spanish.

“They really play with language at that age,” Reneé said.

First-grade teacher Julie Minor said the English-speaking children enjoy the classes so much that they want to speak Spanish as much as possible. But that’s not fair to the Spanish-speaking students, she said. So she crafted a compromise.

“They can answer in Spanish if they also then answer in English,” she said.

Teachers plan to tweak the program for next year, but with no big changes, Morse said.

For the first time, Madison has a wait list to get into kindergarten, she said. A few spots remain for first- and second-grade classes in the dual-language curriculum.

• Kate Martin can be reached at 360-416-2145 or at .