My name is Brittanee Barton. I am majoring in Broadcast Journalism while minoring in Spanish as well as Sports Management and Marketing at Marshall University. The project I filmed, edited, and produced in JMC 360, Digital Imaging, spotlights the Kindergarten Talk program at South-Western City School District in Columbus, Ohio. Kindergarten Talk is an early intervention class for English as second language kindergarten students. In addition to attending their regularly scheduled kindergarten classes, students are also enrolled in a K-Talk class on their off-days.

Columbus may not seem like a city bursting with diversity, but the video shows a clear contradiction to this. The program grew eight-fold in eleven years and now serves students from sixty-one different countries. The goal of K-Talk is to boost reading, writing, communication, and comprehension of the English language so that by the time students reach first grade neither a translator nor further intervention is needed.

I chose to tell this story because intertwining journalism with multiple languages is becoming inevitable. I would like to work in television news someday. Columbus, Ohio is an attractive market to me, as it is my home, and I also have a great interest in sports. This project is proof that being able to speak two languages is beneficial in the Columbus area and I know that sports like soccer and baseball also have a heavy concentration of Spanish.