Educator gives ‘a little piece’ of herself through language immersion program

Walking through the connecting workroom, kindergarten students at Gilbert Primary School know it’s time to switch gears … and switch languages.

Students at the Lexington School District One school spend part of their day learning in Spanish and the other half in a traditional classroom. The Gilbert Primary kindergarten students are learning under an educator who helped give the partial-immersion language program its start in South Carolina.

Gloria Quave received a Lifetime Achievement Award this year from South Carolina Foreign Language Teachers’ Association for her exceptional service to the teaching profession and for mentoring other teachers. “It’s like giving a little piece of me,” she said of teaching Spanish. 

A brighter future. Quave flew out of her native Cuba in 1962 at age 13 on one of the last Operation Pedro Pan flights, a Catholic Welfare Bureau-sponsored program that brought more than 14,000 children from Cuba to America from 1960 to 1962. She and her sister lived in a Louisiana orphanage nearly two years until their parents were able to join them and move the family to Florida.

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