In the fall semester of 2025, Bickel Elementary School will become a full-time dual-immersion magnet school. “We are super excited to provide this opportunity to the Twin Falls Community,” said Wendy Ohlensehlen, Twin Falls School District’s Elementary Programs Director.
The purpose of a dual-immersion magnet school is to provide a bilingual education experience in both English and Spanish. “The benefits of being in a dual-immersion program is becoming bilingual, bi-literate, and culturally competent enough to visit another country and understand their traditions,” Ohlensehlen said.
The program is structured so that students spend half the day learning in English and the other half learning in Spanish. The program prepares students to become “global citizens”. “I believe that learning a second language is an amazing opportunity for students, and I believe that more students will want to become part of the dual-immersion program,” said Ohlensehlen.
However, the dual-immersion program is not a new addition to the Twin Falls School District. “Right now we have our dual-immersion program in Oregon Trail [Elementary School] and it’s really hard to customize a lot of the professional development [for the teachers of Oregon Trail],” said Ohlensehlen. “The other thing is we want to make sure all students in the school district are able to go to the program if they want to. A lot of our Oregon Trail students were in that program so it took up a lot of the seats.”
Since the transition is happening to a currently active elementary school, teachers and students are being moved around the district. According to the Twin Falls School District, positions were found for current Bickel teachers in the school district, and they had to apply for them if they were interested. If teachers do not want to teach in the dual-immersion program, they are being incorporated into the district in other positions or they have the option to leave the district or retire.
Ohlensehlen also said, “I definitely think the magnet program is going to be full and popular. Our hope is that opening up the [dual-immersion] magnet program will continue to make the Twin Falls School District the desirable place for people to be.”
In the 2025-2026 school year, the dual-immersion program will start with grade levels kindergarten through second grade and the program will introduce other grade levels in the following years. To be in the program, a student must start in the dual-immersion program in either kindergarten or first grade, but if a student of a higher level has competent skills in both English and Spanish, they may be accepted into the program.
One frequently asked question about the dual-immersion magnet school is whether or not the student will learn the same amount of content as a student in a regular elementary school. “Students are typically going to be a bit behind their peers through kindergarten to maybe third or fourth grade, but learning a new language allows the neural connections to be made, and with more neural connections, so typically a student who is bilingual will start to exceed their peers in about fourth or fifth grade,” said Ohlensehlen.
Another frequently asked question is, “How can students’ success be tracked when compared to a regular elementary school?” Ohlensehlen said, “Students at the magnet school will still take the same assessments as our students at all of the traditional schools. They will also have an additional test called the AAPPL and it will give us an understanding of how well a student is listening, speaking, and reading in the Spanish language.”
Ohlensehlen said, “I think the dual immersion program is a fabulous opportunity for our community. I think it will help our students become able to compete in a global world, so I think it really prepares our students for the future.”
