Native New Yorker Finds Spanish a 'Lost' Skill
Alisa Rodriguez is a quintessential New York City teenager. Of Puerto Rican descent, Rodriguez was born in the Bronx 14 years ago to parents who were also raised in that New York City borough. Her mother and father graduated from big public high schools in the city.
But Rodriguez's parents—her mother is a school administrator and her father works as a hotel doorman in Times Square—wanted a different education for their daughter, who will start high school in September. Since the second half of her kindergarten year, Rodriguez has attended the Family Life Academy Charter School, a K-8 school in the South Bronx neighborhood of High Bridge that predominantly serves Hispanic students, many of them children of immigrants from Central and South America.
"I would have home-schooled her before sending her to our neighborhood schools," says her mother, Catherine Rodriguez, now the director of operations for Family Life Academy. The senior Rodriguez, who was born in the American commonwealth of Puerto Rico and moved to New York at age 4, left college before earning a degree. Her husband went to work as soon as he...
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