Over the past few months, the IRC has been highlighting teachers working with multicultural, multilingual students who are going above and beyond. This is part of our companion series celebrating parent and community leaders who are advocating for multilingual students. Meet Mónica Arredondo, a parent advocate from Naperville.

Mónica’s parent advocate journey began when her oldest child was in elementary school, and she became a classroom parent volunteer. It was important to her for her children not just to be in a dual language classroom, but to be immersed in their Mexican heritage and the different cultures in the community.

She was passionate about her kids having avenues for reading outside the classroom, and found that the elementary school’s one book club was only in English. “As a dual language elementary, I thought they should also have it in Spanish,” she says.

Mónica joined other parents in doing research to see if there was interest in a dual language book club, and sure enough, there was. Beginning with the 4th and 5th graders, Mónica and fellow parents launched a dual language book club.

“They have other activities outside of school for the kids in dual language to spend time together with other classmates,” she says. “A lot of the activities were sports-related, and there could be many kids who are not interested in sports, so that was a nice thing to do. And having them start in 4th and 5th grade, they meet other kids they will go to middle school with.”

The book club, so far, has been well received, and Mónica says she’s gotten positive feedback from parents she doesn’t know. “I’ve had teachers saying thank you,” she says. “They’re asking their students to read at home in Spanish.”

From there, Mónica began making connection between the schools and the local library, helping launch a bilingual book club there too. She has been working to generate awareness to parents that they can order books in Spanish from the library. She even helped launch a summer reading list in Spanish for the district and encouraged schools to put these books on their library wish list. “I know many kids want to read in Spanish, but they may not know that there are books translated in Spanish,” she says, referring to her third-grader who loves graphic novels. “It’s a way to encourage kids to read things they like in Spanish.”

Mónica says there has been a lot of growth and interest in the Naperville community in initiatives like this to promote multilingualism and expose students to the many cultures within the local community, thanks to her efforts as well as those of the DuPage Hispanic Alliance and Alliance of Latinos Motivating Action in the Suburbs (ALMAS). “We all share the same passion with culture and language and sharing with the rest of the families,” she says. “At [Jefferson Junior High School], it was not just Latino kids. The people attending were from all over.”

Outside of her passion for literacy, Mónica has also been involved in a Two-Way Dual Language Advisory Council in the district. She first connected with the opportunity when her oldest child was in kindergarten, and has been there ever since.

“Different parents have different needs and I think we build on each other with ideas of what we can do for the families and students, and it has just been evolving,” she says. “We offer the book club, but before that it was a book fair, and in the off year we would do another cultural activity for the families. From the time that I started five years ago to today, there’s a huge increase in families interested in attending our events.”

In addition to all of that, Mónica is also a classroom volunteer, and says she gets great joy in being able to have multilingual conversations with students.

“I’ve had kids who didn’t speak any Spanish, zero Spanish but now we can have conversations in Spanish, and that’s the thing that makes me the happiest, seeing kids interested not just in learning the language, but the culture,” she says.