Georgia Project

During the 1990s, Dalton, Georgia's growing carpet industry brought increasing numbers of Spanish speakers into the region and the local school system. In 1996, local attorney and former U.S. Representative Erwin Mitchell recognized the need for bilingual educators in Dalton Public Schools to teach the growing number of non-English speaking students. Mitchell and a small group of Dalton citizens founded the Georgia Project, a community based non-profit organization, to serve the academic needs of Latino and Hispanic students, their teachers, and their parents. The goal of the Georgia Project was to seek qualified bilingual teachers from Spanish speaking countries and develop an exchange program with Dalton schools. Victor Zúñiga, the dean of education and humanities at the University of Monterrey (UDEM) in Mexico, agreed to work with the Georgia Project to create a teacher exchange program. On March 19, 1997, an agreement known as the Monterrey Accord was signed at a ceremony at Dalton High School. The accord established a commitment between Whitfield County Schools, Dalton Public Schools, and UDEM to develop a teacher assistant exchange program, establish an intensive Spanish and Mexican Culture Program (the Summer Institute), develop parent and industry workplace involvement programs, and design bilingual education curriculum. The Monterrey teaching assistants arrived in Dalton Public Schools in the fall of 1997. The initial fourteen teaching assistants were assigned to work with students, ranging from kindergarten to high school, in Dalton and Whitfield schools. The teaching assistants performed varying tasks based on the needs of each school, including orienting teachers to cultural topics, acting as translators, assisting in developing speech therapy materials, and teaching English as a Second Language (ESL). The City of Dalton agreed to fund the Georgia Project's first Summer Institute, an intensive Spanish and Mexican culture program, in June 1997. From 1997 to 2004, more than one hundred Georgia teachers attended the Summer Institute cultural program at UDEM. Originally the entire program was held in Mexico, but in 1999 it was changed to allow teachers to receive two weeks of instruction from Monterrey faculty at Dalton State College and two weeks at the University of Monterrey. In 2001, the Georgia Project partnered with the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) to expand its professional development program for teachers to include year-long workshops on issues of second language acquisition, culture, and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and ESL instructional strategies. CAL was also responsible for conducting a needs assessment of the educational services for non-native English speaking students in Whitfield County. The Georgia Project experienced a total reduction of staff between 2007 and 2008 due to the loss of funding; however, it remains a model for bilingual education programs nationwide.