Geri Chaffee noticed the boys understood the math.

They were second graders at a Sarasota Title I school, pulled aside when considered behind. Chaffee, volunteering that day, began speaking to them in Spanish. The boys brightened, eager to talk, until the teacher told Chaffee to switch to English. “This is America. They need to learn English,” Chaffee was told. She recalls, “It was like all the joy left the room. I could no longer teach them.”

But it was also an educational moment. Chaffee, who had homeschooled her own children, hadn’t yet mastered the acronyms of public schooling—ELL, ESOL, Title I, proficiency, accountability. What she understood was simpler: The boys didn’t lack intelligence. They lacked access to instruction in a language they understood.

“I started asking questions,” she says.

Early on, she was dismissed as “just a mom,” she says—asking inconvenient questions about students learning English, chronically low test scores and why the school district wasn’t trying a different model to reach these students. She pushed for dual-language instruction in Sarasota County, then helped to launch programs in Manatee County when Sarasota showed little interest.

That commitment to educational equity led Chaffee to found Dreamers Academy, a Sarasota public charter school built around dual-language immersion in English and Spanish on Myrtle Street in Newtown. Starting a charter school was daunting—it involved finding a site, navigating finances and learning the mechanics of building a school from the ground up. Someone called her “relentless,” and it wasn’t a compliment. Chaffee took it as a badge. “The ‘no’ comes easy,” she says. “You have to look for the ‘yes.’”

Dreamers Academy opened in 2021 and now serves 658 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. “Children learning English are too often treated as though they’re behind, when they’re simply locked out of the language of instruction,” Chaffee says.

The daughter of Argentine immigrants, Chaffee was born in New York City and moved with her family to Puerto Rico when she was 5. She remembers being an English learner, then becoming a kind of Spanish learner, too. Her parents had enormous faith in education. After careers in public relations, marketing, affordable housing and education, Chaffee came to Sarasota in 2011, asking why so many children with promise weren’t being taught in ways that recognized what they already knew.

“What people don’t understand is that literacy is literacy in any language,” she says. Parents should be encouraged to read to children in whatever language they speak best. “Why should anybody abandon an asset?” she asks.

The stakes start early. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child says early experiences shape school readiness, lifelong learning, health and well-being, leading to broad generational gains among immigrants and their children in education, earnings and poverty reduction. Chaffee’s argument is that children learning English aren’t a problem to be managed—their skills are being measured in the wrong language.

At Dreamers Academy, students move between two connected classrooms. One day, instruction is in Spanish; the next, in English. Teachers work in pairs and share responsibility for the same children, comparing notes, spotting strengths and adjusting instruction. Chaffee tells the story of a boy who responded to an English-speaking teacher in Spanish. The teacher repeated his answer in English, affirmed that he was correct and kept the lesson moving. A family visitor in the classroom that day cried, thinking of children in other schools who don’t get that chance to be understood and affirmed. The model gives Spanish-speaking students room to demonstrate knowledge of a topic before their English fully catches up. English-only speakers learn Spanish. Some are still bridging the two.

The work extends beyond classrooms—73 percent of Dreamers Academy’s students come from economically disadvantaged families, and the school has built programs for parents as well as children, including Familia Connect, with classes in English language acquisition, financial literacy, health care and technology. During the pandemic, Chaffee also helped create “Por Nuestros Niños,” a Spanish-language radio show and podcast for parents supporting children’s learning at home.

After launching Dreamers Academy, Chaffee earned master’s degrees from the University of South Florida and Teachers College at Columbia University. She’s now earning her doctorate in Learning and Leadership in Organizations at Vanderbilt University.

For her, “unity” isn’t a soft word. It’s a classroom where children can answer. It’s a school serving families across lan-guage barriers, background and income. It’s the radical act of hearing a child clearly enough to teach them.