By GEORGE MEGENNEY
Special To The Times
As the principal of Escalon’s two smallest and most rural elementary schools, Collegeville and Farmington, I’ve had the opportunity to oversee each school’s day-to-day operations for the past seven years. Each school has its own distinct culture and charm, the most prominent difference being that Collegeville houses our school district’s Dual Language Immersion program, now in its eighth year and producing students who are demonstrating impressive bilingual skills (the parents of current seventh-grade DLI students at El Portal Middle School would be happy to back me up on this).
While each school’s culture is different, both schools share something very similar: they are, as already noted, small. This description isn’t meant to describe each school’s physical campus, though in fairness, a visitor can walk from one side of each school to the other in about a minute. Instead, the description is intended to describe each school’s student population: Farmington Elementary School currently serves about 90 students, and Collegeville has almost double at just over 170. The numbers need some context: Farmington has six teachers ranging from TK/Kindergarten to fifth grade. Our largest class has about 20 students and our smallest class has nine.
While Collegeville has a larger student population, classroom sizes are similarly small because of the structure of the Dual Language Immersion Program. With the exception of our TK classroom, there are two teachers for each grade level who share students throughout the school day, one teacher who concentrates on Spanish instruction and the other on English instruction. The structure of the program requires that students interact with two teachers during the school day. As a result, class sizes from Kindergarten to fifth grade range from about 10 to 15 students per class.
Whenever I have given interested parents a tour of either school, they are consistently and pleasantly surprised by the small classroom sizes. I think it might be fair to say that while a different school district would consider closing a school with similar student enrollment numbers, the Escalon Unified School District has demonstrated a commitment to keeping each school open and providing the students who attend a high-quality program. The teachers and support staff who work at both schools work hard to make each school a special place for students. They have access to the same training as other elementary teachers in the district, teach by the same basic set of standards, and collaborate with one another not only at the site-level, but also across the district. Collegeville’s teachers do all that, and they do it in two languages.
Here are some other things to consider: When comparing grade-level performance across the district (using STAR assessment data), students at Collegeville and Farmington perform as well (and sometimes better) than students elsewhere in the district. A small student population not only means that teachers have a little more time to focus their efforts on individual students. A smaller number of students also means that the community of adults working there monitors and supervises smaller groups, which results in a relatively low number of incidents requiring discipline. For example, during the 2024-25 school year, there were no students suspended for misbehavior at either school.
For parents and guardians of students who come from Spanish-speaking households, Collegeville provides a unique opportunity to strengthen the home language while steadily developing English skills, offers an environment where parents can easily and quickly communicate with Spanish-speaking teachers, and most significantly, produce students who can not only speak both languages, but also read and write in them as well.
What Collegeville and Farmington lack in terms of the physical size of the school, they more than make up for in other areas. As I mentioned once to the teachers at Farmington, classrooms and buildings don’t teach kids; people do. As the parent of three children, all of whom were raised in Escalon and attended Escalon schools, if I had to do it all over again, they would have attended either one of these fine little schools. Parents and guardians who live within district boundaries (but would otherwise attend Dent or Van Allen) and are interested in taking advantage of what I have described above can explore enrollment through a process called an Intradistrict transfer.
