Fresno County Speaks Dozens of Languages. Its Superintendent Should Understand What That Means.

Fresno County is one of the most linguistically rich places in California. Our students come to school speaking Spanish, Hmong, Punjabi, Arabic, Portuguese, and many other languages. In many of our communities, English is the language of school while another language is the language of home, of grandparents, of everything that matters most. That is not a complication. That is who we are.

The county superintendent needs to understand what language means to a child's education, and I believe I understand it in a way that no other candidate does. I am personally bilingual. I have done the work of learning a second language. I know what it demands, I know what it opens up, and I know what it feels like to cross the line from struggling with a language to being fully present in it.

What Language Means in a Classroom

When a child walks into school speaking Hmong at home, or Spanish, or Punjabi, and the entire educational system operates in a language they are still acquiring, the learning environment asks something extraordinary of them every single day. They are not just learning to read and do math. They are doing all of that while simultaneously building a new linguistic foundation beneath their feet.

The research on this is unambiguous: when schools engage with a child's full linguistic identity rather than working against it, outcomes improve significantly. When families feel that their language is respected rather than treated as an obstacle, they engage more deeply with the school. Family engagement is one of the strongest predictors of academic success, and language is one of the fastest ways to either build or break that connection.

English Learners Are an Asset, Not a Problem to Manage

The conventional discussion about our English Learner population centers on challenges: funding gaps, achievement gaps, program gaps. There is another way to see it. When English Learner students receive the support they need and achieve full reclassification, they become our highest-performing student group. That is not a coincidence. It reflects the resilience, discipline, and cognitive work of students who are navigating two languages and two cultures at the same time. Students like that do not need to be managed. They need to be invested in.

My responsibility as county superintendent is to ensure that every English Learner in Fresno County receives the instruction and support that makes reclassification possible, and to treat the linguistic diversity of this county as the asset it genuinely is.

The Foundation Comes First

California's Global 2030 goal calls for half of all K-12 students to be proficient in two or more languages by the end of the decade. Fresno County, with its extraordinary linguistic diversity, is well-positioned to lead on that goal. But before students can become proficient in two languages, they must become literate in one, and that foundation of strong reading and strong math has to come first.

I support dual immersion programs and the Global 2030 initiative, but the approach has to be sequenced correctly. The goal is multilingual proficiency built on a solid academic base, not bilingualism layered on top of academic struggle.

What My Own Experience Has Taught Me

I speak Spanish as a second language, and I want to be clear about what that experience has given me beyond the ability to communicate with more people. Learning a second language taught me what language acquisition actually requires: the cognitive effort, the vulnerability of not yet being fluent, the specific moment when a language stops feeling foreign and starts feeling like yours. I carry that experience into every conversation I have about how we serve multilingual students, because I have been one, in my own way.

When I walk into a room of parents who speak a language other than English and conduct part of that conversation in Spanish, something shifts. Not because Spanish is the only language that matters in Fresno County, but because it signals that this superintendent understands what it means to cross a language, and will fight for every child who is doing that work every single day.