Flash back to 2003. I am six years-old and a new student at Cunningham Elementary School. My teacher, Miss Connolly, lines up her little cherubs in a straight line and marches us out the classroom door. We're on our way to the library, and we pass many classrooms along the way. Something catches my attention: one of the other first grade classes is speaking a different language. After getting home and recounting the odd experience to my mother, I found out that the class was speaking French. I also discovered that they only speak French. No English. "But why?" I asked my mother. She told me it was an immersion class and that they would be able to speak French fluently. Hold the phone. I wanted to know two languages too. "Why isn't there a Spanish immersion?" I whined. Flash forward to 2013 and I'm still asking myself the same question.

Speaking from ten years of experience, learning Spanish in a non-immersion setting is incredibly difficult. Not only is it challenging, but it doesn't get results. Immersion programs do. Studies have shown that learning a second language as a child is far easier than learning as an adult (or teenager). According to the article "The Benefits of Learning Language Young" on languagestars.com, children learn languages by "absorbing the sounds, structures, intonation patterns and rules of a second language intuitively, as they did their mother tongue. The young brain is inherently flexible, uniquely hard-wired to acquire language naturally." The French immersion program takes advantage of the openness of young minds and completely immerses children in the language. On the other hand, with thirty minute long classes three or four times a week, the elementary school Spanish program simply can't compete. The Spanish classes offered in the Milton Public Schools do not produce fluent Spanish speakers.

According to pewhispanic.org, in 2012 the Latino population in the United States was 53 million strong. The 2011 census revealed that Spanish was the most commonly spoken non-English language in the country with 37.5 million speakers. The huge number of Spanish speakers can't go unnoticed; Spanish is heard almost everywhere you go. Bank ATMs offer instructions in Spanish. Some airports, like the Orlando International Airport in Florida, repeat announcements over the intercom twice—first in English, then in Spanish. Polling from The Associated Press shows that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority around the year 2043. Based on the numbers alone, the simple practicality of offering Spanish immersion classes is undeniable; there is no reason that it shouldn't be offered in the elementary schools.