PBS Is Vital for Bilingual Education

As a child growing up in a Spanish-speaking, immigrant household, I had limited resources available to teach me English. My parents came to this country out of necessity in the 1980s from war-torn Nicaragua. My father worked in construction and only picked up enough English words to get by. Being a former teacher, my mother did her best to teach me to read and write in Spanish. And while my older brother picked up more of the language from playing with neighborhood kids, it wasn’t exactly enough to fully teach me. Fortunately, we had a TV set with plenty of English-language programming, including our local PBS station.

Through this, I watched English-language children’s shows like Sesame Street , Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood , and Reading Rainbow . These wonderful programs helped plant