Anchorage Daily News

PALMER -- Nerissa Torres had a big grin on her face as she looked around her empty fourth-grade room in one of Fronteras Spanish Immersion Charter School's new buildings.

"It's so big," she said. "They kept telling me how small it was, but this is good."

Torres is one of nine teachers -- four of them new to the school -- who'll teach more than 180 students in the Matanuska Susitna Borough's newest charter school when classes start Monday. A former immersion teacher in Chugiak who moved to Florida two years ago, Torres decided the opportunity to work again with children was worth a long separation from her husband.

While Torres took a tour of the Bogard Road facility, leased from Crossroads Community Church, volunteer parents registered their children or hefted bookcases to help teachers move into their classrooms. Cries of "Hola, Cómo estás?" mingled with English greetings in the halls.

Wendy Bowen directed traffic in a furniture-packed multipurpose room. Bowen is on the academic policy committee and has been a teacher at Fronteras since the program began within Larson Elementary School in 2001.

The program, which "immerses" students with a half-day of teaching academic subjects using Spanish, started with 24 students.

Steady growth pushed it to top out at 106 pupils. Staff and parents felt limited both by the curriculum they could offer, and by the fact they had no more room. Two years after the idea was proposed, Fronteras became an independent charter school.

Charter schools are independent, experimental public schools, governed by a volunteer academic policy committee that manages funds allocated by the state education department, hires staff, chooses curriculum and sets policy.

Most are smaller than brick-and-mortar schools. Fronteras will have four K-1 grade classes, two second/third-grade classes, one fourth-grade class and a fifth/sixth-grade class. Bowen said classes will average 21 students.

The charter school framework is more flexible than that of a brick-and-mortar school, said Nina Shaw, a parent of three who's been involved at Fronteras since it began. "We invite a lot of parent innovations -- like volunteer art classes -- and we work as a team with the teachers."

That teamwork mentality requires just as much time from parents as it has for teachers. Bowen said a few parents have put in 120 volunteer hours this summer. Several of her staff haven't taken much time off as they've prepared for Monday, the first day of school.

On Monday, the school was taking shape. State-of-the-art computerized Promethean Boards were hung on newly painted walls, chairs were arranged under tables and boxes of computers were ready to be unpacked.

"It's been Christmas and crazy, all at once," Bowen said.

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