Arlington Heights Preschool depicts growing diversity

Once upon a time Arlington Heights (then called Dunton) was a homogeneous community. William Dunton came from upstate New York. And most of the early settlers in this part of Illinois came from either upstate New York or the New England states.

They'd fled that legendary rocky soil for the sumptuous loam of some of the best farmland in the world. Even though they had found spectacularly fertile land, the New Englanders weren't particularly skillful farmers. The Germans who made up Arlington's next wave of settlers were better farmers. When they came in the years before the Civil War, they bought up the farms from the former New Englanders, who were happy to move into town.

That somewhat uneasy mix of Germans and Yankee New Englanders - there were taunts of "Dutchies" - prevailed in Arlington Heights for a hundred years. Then, at the end of World War II, a fruit basket of nationalities exploded into Arlington, looking not for farms, but for suburban living. Although they represented many countries, even then those countries were largely European.

Now after another 56 years, the pattern is changing once again. We see it in all our schools. The preschool of the Christian Liberty Academy, which meets five days a week in the old girls' locker room of what was Arlington High School, for instance, is one small local replica of the United Nations.

Visiting Arlington High alumni might expect to find the old brick walls, benches, lockers, and shower stalls when they opened the familiar door off the football field. Instead, they'd find that the old shower room is now the "messy room" because it has a convenient drain in the floor. Lunch and art activities take place there. They'd see 93-year-olds coloring pictures of apples and saying, "A." They come from homes where 11 different languages are spoken and nine Indian dialects. They speak English, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Korean, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and the Eastern Indian dialects of Urdu, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Hindi, Lakshmi and Magesh.

Twenty-two of the 90 children are from Arlington Heights.

There is no simultaneous translation for the children who come without English. But, Director Sherry Kurz observes that "from the start they play together without question." They may be aware of differences, "but that doesn't matter when they play. You can still be the Mom. I can still be the sister. There is a universal language of play."

As Kurz says, "They can see they are all the same in so many ways." She illustrates her thought by telling how one of the Indian mothers, like mothers everywhere, chose what she hoped would be a unique name for her son. She called him Pranav.

What she found when she enrolled him in the Christian Liberty Preschool is what mothers of Michaels and Matthews and Laurens everywhere have found when they took their children to enrollment. Her name for her son was not at all unique in the Christian Liberty Academy Preschool.

There were four Pranavs in his class.