J.R. Tucker High School’s Spanish Center celebrates 30 years of 'bridging cultures'

Suzie Hester, the director of Henrico Schools’ Center for Spanish Language and Global Citizenship, was shuffling through papers in her office one day when she saw an old newspaper clipping from the Henrico Citizen.

“Tucker High School’s Specialty Center commemorates 10 years.” The article was published in 2004, exactly 20 years ago.

Hester, realizing that 2024 was the 30th anniversary of the Spanish Center, decided that now would be the time to invite back all of the center’s alumni for a big celebration – including a dinner of Spanish paella and music by a Spanish guitarist.

“We’re going all out,” she said. “This is a big deal. I mean maybe it’s just a big deal for me because I’m freaking excited, but it’s all coming together.”

On Oct. 4, current center students, teachers, and alumni from each graduating class of the past 30 years filled the halls of J.R. Tucker High School – including U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-Seventh District), who was one of 12 graduates of the center’s first graduating class in 1997. Now, the graduating classes usually are larger, with about 24 to 32 students in each class.

Students in Tucker’s Spanish Center, one of HCPS’ 22 specialty centers, take at least two immersion classes all four years of high school, with one being a Spanish language class and the other being a core class, such as World History or Health and PE, taught only in Spanish. The center also has classes that focus more on Spanish and Hispanic culture and history, such as “Cultures and Connections” and “Contemporary Perspectives.”

After graduating, most students leave the program nearly fluent in Spanish and with a much greater understanding of Hispanic culture, said Maurice Sawyers, a Class of 2022 graduate.

“I feel like you could drop me in the middle of a Spanish-speaking country and not tell me where I’m at and I’d be comfortable enough to find my way through it,” he said. “If you don’t feel at least comfortable enough just with the Spanish language, you learn everything about the Spanish culture itself.”

Students even get the opportunity to study abroad for two weeks during the summer in Spain, staying with a Spanish-speaking host family and participating in various cultural activities, like making paella and attending a dancing class. The Spanish Center is Henrico’s only specialty center that offers a study abroad session.

“Before coming to Tucker, I didn’t even know that any [high] school, especially here in Henrico County, offered any type of study abroad program,” said Elijah Coles-Brown, a graduate from the Class of 2022. “I thought that was only a college thing. So when I was able to take that experience here when I was at Tucker, that was just amazing to me.”

But a lot of cultural learning happens much closer to home. Tucker High, ranked Virginia’s most racially diverse high school in 2024, has a large population of Spanish-speaking students – 28% of the student body is Hispanic and 20% are English Learners, with the majority being Spanish speakers.

Multiple times during the school year, students from the Spanish Center will join together with ESL classes, working on projects and learning Spanish and English from each other, Hester said.

“Because the world is here at Tucker, it’s easy for us to kind of bridge that culture,” Hester said. “Tucker has over 500 ESL students and the majority of them are Spanish speaking, so we do a lot of partnering with them to get to know them. They get to practice their English and we practice our Spanish with students from all over the world.”

The center itself is also diverse, pulling students from every magisterial district in Henrico. All students are welcome to apply before their freshman year and take an entrance exam, and Hester promotes the center to students at middle schools across the county.

“This is not just a little West End cliche,” Hester said. “We have kids from the East End and all over, from every middle school in this county. So we hail to be very diverse in our center as well as Tucker itself is very diverse.”

For Sawyers, who is now a college junior, joining the center even convinced him to go to college. The immersion classes pushed him academically and prompted him to put more focus on his school career.

“Originally, I had never planned on going to college freshman year,” said Sawyers. “But throughout immersion, it really kind of gives you a good work ethic, so I really locked in. Honestly, I wouldn’t say it saved me, but it put me on the right track.

During the four years spent with a fairly small group of students, each class in the center becomes a tight-knight cohort, Coles-Brown said.

“We’re like a family. All of the classes you’re taking are with the exact same people, so all of our immersion classes were with the same class,” he said. “So we all graduated together. We came in together, we left together. And I still talk to a lot of those people.”

Even after all of these years, Hester was surprised to see how many alumni came back for the celebration and how many alumni had kept in touch with each other. The cohort becomes “a family within the Tucker family,” she said.

“They come into the program and they stay together for all of those Spanish language classes, but yet they’re also a part of the whole Tucker community,” Hester said. “And it’s funny because these alumni have kept in touch. That’s the beautiful thing, once you’re here, that cohort is a tight-knit unit and they have stayed in touch throughout the years, beginning in 1997 to 2024.”

Liana Hardy is the Citizen’s Report for America Corps member and education reporter. Her position is dependent upon reader support; make a tax-deductible contribution to the Citizen through RFA here.