U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona launched a multi-state school bus tour at Jackson Elementary school in Green Bay, September 3, 2024. PC: Fox 11 Online
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) –Celebrating the power of bilingualism and student potential, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona launched a multi-state school bus tour at a Green Bay elementary school.
Secretary Cardona greeted students at Jackson Elementary School Tuesday morning.
The Back to School Bus Tour, featuring stops in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, aims to showcase the ways schools, families, and communities are accelerating student achievement.
Secretary Cardona said 40 years ago, as an elementary school student, he had to learn English, and it was the public school system that that provided him with the right tools and the confidence to achieve his goals.
“I knew I only had what the local public school provided and thankfully it provided me not only with the skills I needed to continue to grow to be a teacher, a school principal, all the way up to secretary but it also gave me the confidence that I needed to see myself as somebody with value and that’s what we’re seeing in these hallways and classrooms and that’s what we’re celebrating on this bus tour – public education, public schools are the places where students find themselves and reach their potential and that’s why we’re fighting for public education, every student across the country should have access to a high quality public school,” Cardona said.
Recently Jackson Elementary School received a grant to promote bilingualism in its curriculum.
“It’s customary in other countries for students to learn two, three, four languages, here, we’re lucky if we get two. So it’s a two-part strategy for us: Number one, we want to make sure all students learn English at very high levels but having another language or maintaining their native language,” Cardona said. “That’s part of the fighting for public education bus tour is making sure that we have well-resourced schools, well-funded schools and supported schools, multilingualism is part of that and it’s also embracing students’ native cultures too, we come from different parts, that’s the beauty of this experiment that is the United States of America.”
Secretary Cardona’s next stop Tuesday is an Oneida school.
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