The school board is made up of students' parents who decide on administrative matters, whereas the academic and pedagogic issues are in the hands of the department heads. Padres has 202 students, their ages ranging from 3 to 12. Classes are usually made up of 20 students. When they turn five, the number of hours is increased to six per week as a transition to elementary school where all grades have two hours and a half of EFL instruction from Monday to Thursday. Literature is integrated in all other syllabuses, especially in language.
Students attend the mainstream in Spanish in the morning and their English classes in the afternoon.
Two years ago, when I started working in the school, content was already part of the school curriculum as of third grade. Teachers believed that content instruction resulted in greater gains for students and thus, they made great efforts to use it. Yet sometimes this instruction was reduced to teachers' lectures and students' memorization of lessons from a textbook. The program lacked a coherent syllabus and there was some overlap in the topics covered in the different grades. In addition, communication between English and Spanish teachers was practically nonexistent.