Read the full article by Justine Chahal at CapRadio
CASA de ESPAÑOL, located at 1101 R Street, is a Spanish school and cultural center that has been operating since 2011. Maria Harrington, the creator and director of CASA, has over 20 years of experience teaching Spanish to students from elementary to college level.
Harrington says the goal when creating CASA was ultimately to have a cultural hub. In order to achieve this, she and her husband, Johnny Walker, decided to create the language school to have an anchor business.
“[As a] 501(c)(3), you’re always struggling trying to get money so we thought if we could provide that with our business, if we could do all of our extracurriculars outside of it with the revenue from that business, that would be awesome,” Harrington says.
Harrington and Walker originally opened the school on J Street, where Harrington says she would hand out fliers to promote the classes. The first semester they had 25 students and within a year, it quickly grew to 100.