Closing gaps with language immersion

Being the principal at North Academy of World Languages (NAWL) felt like a position Lydia Fergison had been training for since high school.

A teacher of hers recognized her ability to embrace other cultures as well as her ability to speak Spanish. In college, she studied Spanish and studied abroad in Spain.

While she didn’t want to pursue education as a career initially, she found herself working with and on behalf of young people. Fergison is currently in her 19th year in education and her eighth year as a principal. She is also a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte researching how language immersion closes opportunity gaps.

“Being a leader of a school where you are sharing the benefits of being multilingual, multicultural with underrepresented students is really a dream come true,” she said.

Fergison was also recently named Principal of the Year for the North Learning Community.

“When (your peers) see something in you that they deem worthy of acknowledgement, that holds so much because I can say the same about them,” she said. “We all support each other on this journey and for many of us, these past few years have been tough. You can choose to be unhappy, and you can choose to complain, but we just made our own bubble here and we chose to be happy with what we were building.

“Here we are, two years after opening a brand new school in the middle of the pandemic and having to hire, market, brand and recruit all online,” she added. “We doubled our enrollment in the second year and even had some waitlists for some of the kindergarten immersion classes. That’s just a testament of walking and living in your passion.”

North Learning Community Superintendent Tangela Williams said Fergison is the “people’s principal.”

“She leads with a people-first mindset as she recognizes the strengths of her staff, celebrates them often and verbalizes her appreciation for their craft,” said Williams. “Principal Fergison also makes student-centered decisions that have resulted in strong academic outcomes and has quickly made NAWL a coveted school of choice for the North Learning Community.”

Fergison considers NAWL a unicorn -  and not just because their mascot is the Narwhal.

NAWL is a magnet school in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and offers language immersion in German, French and Chinese. But in addition to the language, Fergison is proud that the school celebrates the cultural norms that come with it. 

When parents give school tours to other prospective parents, Fergison said they always share, “Be prepared to always celebrate something.”

“You find that it becomes a family celebration,” she said. “When we celebrate St. Nikolaus, the parents are just as excited to put their shoes out at night and learn the different traditions that the kids are learning.”

Fergison said it’s empowering to see students year after year learning a new language and sharing the same excitement she had when she studied Spanish. Her mantra at work is to run a school as good enough for your own child or a child you love.

She lives her mantra daily as her daughter is in the French immersion program at NAWL.

“I was blessed to be around teachers who spoke life into me,” she said. “Now I can pay that forward to my own child and other people’s children.”