Gareth Zehrbach resigns as Nuestro Mundo principal
Reflections on Nuestro
Reflections on Nuestro
new concept in education. Zehrbach, s self-described social entrepreneur, was up to the challenge.
One of his biggest immediate challenges was hiring the staff for the school. Bilingual teachers fluent and competent in both languages — English and Spanish
— weren’t in great abundance back then. “In the beginning, we were hiring the day before school started,” Zehrbach recalled. “Bryan Grau [Nuestro Mundo’s
board chair] and I were sitting there trying to hire. We were hiring the day before school because they just weren’t out there.” As the years went by, the supply
became more plentiful and the district began to use an early hiring process to secure the best teachers who had entered the market.
While the Nuestro Mundo board had documented the need and the demand for a dual language immersion school, Zehrbach found it difficult to recruit
the native Spanish speaking students at first, which surprised him. “Within dual language education, a lot of people will tell you one of the hardest pieces is to
get Spanish speakers to sign up,” Zehrbach said. “Understandably so, parents of Spanish speakers are saying ‘Why in the world is it so important to keep this
Spanish? When I am out in the workplace, the first question they ask everyone is how much Spanish do they speak.’ So it is counterintuitive for them to say that
they are going to actually reach a high proficiency level of English if they enroll in a dual language program that maintains their native language rather than
going into an English only program. And again, if you walk a mile in their shoes, they need to know English right away. So that is a difficult piece. It takes some
time sitting in their homes talking to them about what this dual language is all about and finding out what kinds of questions they have to make them feel
comfortable that this is something that is going to be good for their child. That became less of an issue because once you get a few groups through, then you
get the word of mouth. The word starts spreading in the community that dual language is a good thing for the kids. It becomes less of an issue. It will become
even less of an issue once the kids start hitting the middle schools and more test scores come out. Then there will be no recruitment needed at all from that
standpoint.”
One other difficulty Zehrback experienced with the Spanish speaking families was getting the parents to participate in the school. “Seeing that parental
involvement evolve has been pretty special to me,” Zehrbach said. “That’s taken a lot of work. People think that happens naturally within a dual language
school. I thought it was going to come together more naturally during my first year and it didn’t. We had the typical thing happen, the Spanish speakers kind of
falling out. We took steps to rectify that and it was a lot of work. But we see the fruit of that now.”
Since Zehrbach was new to the district, setting up a new school as complex as Nuestro Mundo is could have been disastrous because Zehrbach didn’t know
how to work the bureaucracy to get what he needed. While the administration initially opposed the formation of the school, Zehrbach emphasized that the
administration did everything in its power to help the school succeed. And he was fortunate that the district had an ‘insider’ position to help him navigate the
bureaucracy. Jenny Allen, the former principal at Midvale Elementary, was the lead principal — not assigned to any school — who was a valuable resource to
Zehrbach. She helped him troubleshoot and get the resources he needed.
One of the most difficult tasks that Zehrbach faced was reconciling the different visions and perspectives that the district administration and Nuestro Mundo’
s board had for the school. The Nuestro Mundo board had developed the concept for the school and held its charter. The school district held the resources for
the school and was Zehrbach’s employer. Each side needed the other, but their perspectives were sometimes at odds with each other. About every six weeks,
the school’s bridging committee met. It was composed of the school’s and the district’s representatives and Zehrbach. Its task was to reconcile the perspectives
and set policy for the school.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat it and say there was never a situation where it was taxing at times,” Zehrbach said. “There were points throughout the four years
when there were issues that came up and there were totally different viewpoints on how things should happen. And it was my role to make sure that things kept
moving forward. And that’s tough. The district pays you, yet you do feel an allegiance to the group. Without the charter board, the school would have never
existed. That’s just a fact. So you do feel somewhat of an allegiance and you do want to help make sure that this group that started this school has their
viewpoints are being incorporated into the operation of the school as well. The district has a district perspective. Nuestro Mundo charter board has a single
school perspective. When there is a fixed pot of resources and your role is to make sure all 50 schools are running and have their programs and then you have a
group looking after one school, sometimes those visions collide. You have to reconcile that. But I do think both parties are looking out for the kids. They look
out for what is best for the kids, but those visions sometimes clash.”
Creating Nuestro Mundo inside Frank Allis Elementary was also a challenge. Not only was the school being created on someone else’s turf, but it was also
flush with federal grant money to start the school, while Frank Allis Elementary itself had been existing for years with the scarcity caused by the state’s revenue
caps. It was a situation ripe for conflict.
Zehrbach’s solution was to ‘share the wealth’ whenever funding guidelines permitted it. “Some people were saying ‘How come they are getting all of these
new materials and we don’t have new materials,’” Zehrbach said. “You try to mitigate that by doing as much as you can for everyone. We redid the whole
computer lab, which was a lot of money. But that was for everyone. All the kids in the school benefitted from the new computer lab. We purchased things like
risers or chairs for the gymnasium. We’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars for this that the school didn’t have before. We purchased them for everyone.
You work to make sure you are doing things like that. But nevertheless, it is hard for some people to reconcile that.”
And no matter how welcoming the principal is, the situation can still be difficult because there are two school leaders under one roof. “Whenever there are
two chiefs in one building and you are sharing a lot of resources, people can look at that from very different perspectives in terms of what is fair and equitable,”
Zehrbach said. “We do share PE teachers and music teachers. There are positions that the two schools share. Stakeholders of the schools can have very
different perspectives in terms of how you are accessing that support and help. Are you using too much or too little of it?
In spite of all of the challenges, Zehrbach looks back with pride at how the school has developed. Nuestro Mundo events are packed with students and their
families. And the students are truly becoming bilingual. “I will make no secret of the fact that I am very proud of the school,” Zehrbach said. “I think we’ve done
a lot of great things under a lot of pressure, especially the first two years. After the first two years, the pressure, in terms of how I felt, decreased somewhat.
People did recognize ‘Okay this school is not like some crazy institution where they are brainwashing people.’ ‘Are they really going to learn anything?’ ‘Are
people just going to enroll for a day and then leave because it is so bizarre?’ The word quickly spread and diffused into the community that this was a good
school.”
And while Zehrbach originally had problems recruiting native Spanish speaking families to participate, the problem now is too much demand. For the
upcoming school year, new students will be restricted to the Frank Allis attendance zone. And these students will be selected by lottery because there are not
enough slots.
Zehrbach related a story that he had heard just that morning that epitomized the success of Nuestro Mundo. “This morning I met a student colleague of
mine from my initial cohort here at UW from 2001 and she is just about to defend her dissertation,” Zehrbach said. “She came up to me and asked how I was
doing. She had a job in Buffalo. She told me ‘I have to tell you. I’m taking my daughter at Goodman Pool for swim lessons. It was two weeks ago. My father-in-
law is from Argentina. We were at the pool watching the swim lessons and having a discussion in Spanish. This African American girl came up. She looked to
be in the second or third grade. And she just started talking to us in Spanish. Oh, you guys speak Spanish. I speak Spanish too.’ They talked all in Spanish. Her
father-in-law was just astounded. He asked her if she spoke Spanish in her house. He couldn’t envision how this Black girl could be speaking Spanish like this.
She told them that she attended this special school, Nuestro Mundo, where they got to learn about languages. I was almost in tears.”
Zehrbach is completing his dissertation — which is now about diual language immersion schools — and will soon be headed back to his native Phoenix.
On some levels, he knows that if he never accomplishes another thing, he will always feel that he did something valuable in life when he helped create
Nuestro Mundo.
And he hopes to be back some day for Nuestro’s 50th anniversary. “I can say I was a part of that when it started,” Zehrbach said. “I was part of the original
group. We were part of something special.” And special, indeed, it is.
One of his biggest immediate challenges was hiring the staff for the school. Bilingual teachers fluent and competent in both languages — English and Spanish
— weren’t in great abundance back then. “In the beginning, we were hiring the day before school started,” Zehrbach recalled. “Bryan Grau [Nuestro Mundo’s
board chair] and I were sitting there trying to hire. We were hiring the day before school because they just weren’t out there.” As the years went by, the supply
became more plentiful and the district began to use an early hiring process to secure the best teachers who had entered the market.
While the Nuestro Mundo board had documented the need and the demand for a dual language immersion school, Zehrbach found it difficult to recruit
the native Spanish speaking students at first, which surprised him. “Within dual language education, a lot of people will tell you one of the hardest pieces is to
get Spanish speakers to sign up,” Zehrbach said. “Understandably so, parents of Spanish speakers are saying ‘Why in the world is it so important to keep this
Spanish? When I am out in the workplace, the first question they ask everyone is how much Spanish do they speak.’ So it is counterintuitive for them to say that
they are going to actually reach a high proficiency level of English if they enroll in a dual language program that maintains their native language rather than
going into an English only program. And again, if you walk a mile in their shoes, they need to know English right away. So that is a difficult piece. It takes some
time sitting in their homes talking to them about what this dual language is all about and finding out what kinds of questions they have to make them feel
comfortable that this is something that is going to be good for their child. That became less of an issue because once you get a few groups through, then you
get the word of mouth. The word starts spreading in the community that dual language is a good thing for the kids. It becomes less of an issue. It will become
even less of an issue once the kids start hitting the middle schools and more test scores come out. Then there will be no recruitment needed at all from that
standpoint.”
One other difficulty Zehrback experienced with the Spanish speaking families was getting the parents to participate in the school. “Seeing that parental
involvement evolve has been pretty special to me,” Zehrbach said. “That’s taken a lot of work. People think that happens naturally within a dual language
school. I thought it was going to come together more naturally during my first year and it didn’t. We had the typical thing happen, the Spanish speakers kind of
falling out. We took steps to rectify that and it was a lot of work. But we see the fruit of that now.”
Since Zehrbach was new to the district, setting up a new school as complex as Nuestro Mundo is could have been disastrous because Zehrbach didn’t know
how to work the bureaucracy to get what he needed. While the administration initially opposed the formation of the school, Zehrbach emphasized that the
administration did everything in its power to help the school succeed. And he was fortunate that the district had an ‘insider’ position to help him navigate the
bureaucracy. Jenny Allen, the former principal at Midvale Elementary, was the lead principal — not assigned to any school — who was a valuable resource to
Zehrbach. She helped him troubleshoot and get the resources he needed.
One of the most difficult tasks that Zehrbach faced was reconciling the different visions and perspectives that the district administration and Nuestro Mundo’
s board had for the school. The Nuestro Mundo board had developed the concept for the school and held its charter. The school district held the resources for
the school and was Zehrbach’s employer. Each side needed the other, but their perspectives were sometimes at odds with each other. About every six weeks,
the school’s bridging committee met. It was composed of the school’s and the district’s representatives and Zehrbach. Its task was to reconcile the perspectives
and set policy for the school.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat it and say there was never a situation where it was taxing at times,” Zehrbach said. “There were points throughout the four years
when there were issues that came up and there were totally different viewpoints on how things should happen. And it was my role to make sure that things kept
moving forward. And that’s tough. The district pays you, yet you do feel an allegiance to the group. Without the charter board, the school would have never
existed. That’s just a fact. So you do feel somewhat of an allegiance and you do want to help make sure that this group that started this school has their
viewpoints are being incorporated into the operation of the school as well. The district has a district perspective. Nuestro Mundo charter board has a single
school perspective. When there is a fixed pot of resources and your role is to make sure all 50 schools are running and have their programs and then you have a
group looking after one school, sometimes those visions collide. You have to reconcile that. But I do think both parties are looking out for the kids. They look
out for what is best for the kids, but those visions sometimes clash.”
Creating Nuestro Mundo inside Frank Allis Elementary was also a challenge. Not only was the school being created on someone else’s turf, but it was also
flush with federal grant money to start the school, while Frank Allis Elementary itself had been existing for years with the scarcity caused by the state’s revenue
caps. It was a situation ripe for conflict.
Zehrbach’s solution was to ‘share the wealth’ whenever funding guidelines permitted it. “Some people were saying ‘How come they are getting all of these
new materials and we don’t have new materials,’” Zehrbach said. “You try to mitigate that by doing as much as you can for everyone. We redid the whole
computer lab, which was a lot of money. But that was for everyone. All the kids in the school benefitted from the new computer lab. We purchased things like
risers or chairs for the gymnasium. We’re talking thousands and thousands of dollars for this that the school didn’t have before. We purchased them for everyone.
You work to make sure you are doing things like that. But nevertheless, it is hard for some people to reconcile that.”
And no matter how welcoming the principal is, the situation can still be difficult because there are two school leaders under one roof. “Whenever there are
two chiefs in one building and you are sharing a lot of resources, people can look at that from very different perspectives in terms of what is fair and equitable,”
Zehrbach said. “We do share PE teachers and music teachers. There are positions that the two schools share. Stakeholders of the schools can have very
different perspectives in terms of how you are accessing that support and help. Are you using too much or too little of it?
In spite of all of the challenges, Zehrbach looks back with pride at how the school has developed. Nuestro Mundo events are packed with students and their
families. And the students are truly becoming bilingual. “I will make no secret of the fact that I am very proud of the school,” Zehrbach said. “I think we’ve done
a lot of great things under a lot of pressure, especially the first two years. After the first two years, the pressure, in terms of how I felt, decreased somewhat.
People did recognize ‘Okay this school is not like some crazy institution where they are brainwashing people.’ ‘Are they really going to learn anything?’ ‘Are
people just going to enroll for a day and then leave because it is so bizarre?’ The word quickly spread and diffused into the community that this was a good
school.”
And while Zehrbach originally had problems recruiting native Spanish speaking families to participate, the problem now is too much demand. For the
upcoming school year, new students will be restricted to the Frank Allis attendance zone. And these students will be selected by lottery because there are not
enough slots.
Zehrbach related a story that he had heard just that morning that epitomized the success of Nuestro Mundo. “This morning I met a student colleague of
mine from my initial cohort here at UW from 2001 and she is just about to defend her dissertation,” Zehrbach said. “She came up to me and asked how I was
doing. She had a job in Buffalo. She told me ‘I have to tell you. I’m taking my daughter at Goodman Pool for swim lessons. It was two weeks ago. My father-in-
law is from Argentina. We were at the pool watching the swim lessons and having a discussion in Spanish. This African American girl came up. She looked to
be in the second or third grade. And she just started talking to us in Spanish. Oh, you guys speak Spanish. I speak Spanish too.’ They talked all in Spanish. Her
father-in-law was just astounded. He asked her if she spoke Spanish in her house. He couldn’t envision how this Black girl could be speaking Spanish like this.
She told them that she attended this special school, Nuestro Mundo, where they got to learn about languages. I was almost in tears.”
Zehrbach is completing his dissertation — which is now about diual language immersion schools — and will soon be headed back to his native Phoenix.
On some levels, he knows that if he never accomplishes another thing, he will always feel that he did something valuable in life when he helped create
Nuestro Mundo.
And he hopes to be back some day for Nuestro’s 50th anniversary. “I can say I was a part of that when it started,” Zehrbach said. “I was part of the original
group. We were part of something special.” And special, indeed, it is.
Margaret Zehrbach (l-r), Gareth Zehrbach, Gareth Michael
Zehrbach and Megan Zehrbach
Zehrbach and Megan Zehrbach
By Jonathan Gramling
Gareth Zehrbach was minding his own business back in 2004 as a Ph.D. student in the
School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when opportunity knocked. He had
finished his coursework and was set to write his dissertation on the Head Start program. A friend
of his, Martin Scanlon, had taken a job at the Madison Metropolitan School District to plan a
charter school with a dial language immersion emphasis. Now the school needed to hire its first
principal. And Scanlon hadn’t forgotten that Zehrbach had given him some materials on dual
language schools.
At first, Zehrbach dismissed Scanlon’s overtures because he was intent on finishing his
degree and leaving Madison. But the more Scanlon got him to think about the job, the more
attractive it became. “It was very enticing to know you were going to be able to help start
something very new in this community and pretty much have your vision to really help guide
the growth of the school,” Zehrbach said during an interview with The Capital City Hues.
Zehrbach put his thesis on hold and accepted the position as Nuestro Mundo’s first principal.
It was an incredible challenge to start up Nuestro Mundo and guide it through its infancy. The
school had been created against the recommendation of the district’s administration. It was a
separate school that would be housed at Frank Allis Elementary School. And it was a relatively
Gareth Zehrbach was minding his own business back in 2004 as a Ph.D. student in the
School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when opportunity knocked. He had
finished his coursework and was set to write his dissertation on the Head Start program. A friend
of his, Martin Scanlon, had taken a job at the Madison Metropolitan School District to plan a
charter school with a dial language immersion emphasis. Now the school needed to hire its first
principal. And Scanlon hadn’t forgotten that Zehrbach had given him some materials on dual
language schools.
At first, Zehrbach dismissed Scanlon’s overtures because he was intent on finishing his
degree and leaving Madison. But the more Scanlon got him to think about the job, the more
attractive it became. “It was very enticing to know you were going to be able to help start
something very new in this community and pretty much have your vision to really help guide
the growth of the school,” Zehrbach said during an interview with The Capital City Hues.
Zehrbach put his thesis on hold and accepted the position as Nuestro Mundo’s first principal.
It was an incredible challenge to start up Nuestro Mundo and guide it through its infancy. The
school had been created against the recommendation of the district’s administration. It was a
separate school that would be housed at Frank Allis Elementary School. And it was a relatively