Kansas Needs Spanish Classes for Heritage Speakers. Here's Why

Kansas | August 12, 2026

By Esther Showstack | Planeta Venus

Stock illustration by Natalie_

In sixth grade, my school required me to take a Spanish for beginners class. In this class, they taught us how to count, how to say our ABCs, and basic words like ‘happy’ and ‘sad’. Easy enough, right? But this class posed a problem for me—as my entire life I had grown up speaking Spanish at home. Taking this class effectively was a waste of time not only because it left me bored, but also because it left me unchallenged and left my potential to grow in unexplored areas, language-wise, completely untapped. I’m what is called a ‘heritage speaker,’ or someone who was raised in a household where a language other than English is spoken and who speaks or at least understands this language. My heritage language, like many other Hispanic and Latino students, is Spanish; and despite the fact that Hispanics and Latinos make up 39.6% of the student body of USD 259 (the Wichita Public School district), most middle and high schools do not offer any sort of appropriate-level language classes for the estimated over thirteen thousand heritage speakers that there are.

In USD 259, there are approximately 17,850 Hispanic/Latino students enrolled in schools; about thirteen thousand of these students, those who speak Spanish, are at risk of forgetting how to understand and speak their heritage language—and may never have the opportunity to develop literacy skills in it. The change is invisible, but all the more so harmful: as the student spends the majority of their day speaking English at school and other institutions, they slowly shift into an English-dominant mindset, where Spanish is disregarded and may be ultimately discarded. With the inclusion of Spanish classes for heritage speakers in the school curriculum, the threat of losing the heritage language to the overwhelmingly spoken English will be minimized, and students will be able to learn important skills in Spanish that they otherwise would not have been able to develop.

I have estimated the number of Spanish speakers among those enrolled in USD 259 to be 13,387 students—based on the Pew Research Center’s 2023 study which found that “75% [of Latinos] say they are able to carry on a conversation in Spanish pretty well or very well,” a statistic I have applied to the 17,850 given by USD 259—though it is important to remember that this number is only an approximation. Additionally, there are many Hispanics/Latinos who are ‘receptive bilinguals’ in Spanish—or those who are able to comprehend but do not speak the language—and whom I have not included in this estimation, but who must be mentioned as part of this discussion, as they are heritage speakers as well.

But can’t heritage speakers just practice their Spanish at home? Not exactly. As the label of a ‘heritage speaker’ serves more as an umbrella term than a single-definition identity, including those who are able to comprehend, speak, and/or write in Spanish (or all three) in varying levels of proficiency, being a heritage speaker does not automatically make a student (or their parents) able to teach the language. That is to say, even though heritage speakers may be able to speak the language, they may not be able to write or read in it; and in most cases, the heritage speaker does not possess the advanced knowledge or understanding over the language’s grammar required to teach themselves more advanced grammatical concepts: as, grammar-wise, they only know what they have instinctively learned from speaking the language. Thus, heritage speakers require a specific course that allows them to focus on skills such as grammar and vocabulary that are not touched upon in day-to-day familial or community conversation, as well as to develop their abilities to use the language in different contexts and with different levels of formality.

The lack of such classes in USD 259 threatens the ultimate unlearning of the heritage language. Hispanic/Latino students who speak English at school for most, if not all, of the day find difficulty switching back to speaking solely Spanish at home; and this continual rejection of the heritage language may be exacerbated if Spanish is not the only language spoken within their household. According to the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University’s Estudios del Observatorio, “the total number of Hispanic people who speak Spanish at home has fallen 5%, from 75% to 70%” from 1980 to 2019,” while, in those years, English proficiency among Latinos “has risen 13%”; and it would not be difficult to see how this correlates with the dominance of English within public schools. I myself can attest to the seemingly invisible switch that being at school has on my mind: when I speak English at school for a prolonged period of time, I begin to ignore when my parents speak to me in Spanish, in favor of replying in English; and, eventually, I even begin to forget how to say words or phrases (and more often than not, verb conjugations) that would have come to me with ease, had I been speaking Spanish more throughout the day.

The phenomenon of Spanish speakers, and those who speak other heritage languages, losing their language to the United States’ widely spoken English has been observed a multitude of times, and has earned itself a name: the ‘three-generation rule’. Most commonly, this occurrence befalls immigrant families within the country; in essence, it states that in three generations or less, the heritage language of a given family is most likely to dissipate, as English will have become the dominant language of this last generation—and the heritage language will come to them with some difficulty, at best. So how do we make sure that this doesn’t happen?

We set up a heritage language class. We set it up in every high school, regardless of how many heritage speakers there are: even if there are only a couple in the entire school, this puts them more at risk of losing their language in favor of conforming to the dominant English; and these students still have the right to receive an education at their level—denying them this would be discrimination. In this class, we must make sure that the students are engaged, learning, and willing to learn more: to do so, they must be given texts to read and analyze that are at their level; and, most importantly, the class must be treated as if it were a language arts class, and not just a ‘foreign language class’. To accomplish this, the class curriculum must be one suitable for heritage-language students, by targeting their weaknesses—instead of being only a review of their strong suits, as my sixth-grade Spanish class was for me. The class cannot simply be a fifty-minute conjugation-memorization and term-review: it must teach the students new skills that they are not given the opportunity to develop with an oral comprehension of the language.

So, what can we do to help advocate for heritage-language classes? Everybody—regardless of age or the language that you speak—can talk or write to school administrators, urging them to add classes for heritage speakers to their course offerings, and stress the importance of this by stating what I have mentioned: such as the fact that a denial of this educational opportunity would be discrimination against heritage speakers, who are not able to take level-appropriate language classes; and that the addition of these classes is essential for the preservation of language and culture. Moreover, we can communicate to these key decision makers that they should invest more in their language programs, as well as the consequences of not doing so.

Once Spanish for heritage speakers classes are incorporated into USD 259, students will no longer have to review things as simple as their ABCs in high school. Rather, we will be challenged and prepared for our futures, as well as be able to find our community—who we may not have thought was present—within our schools.