The paper chronicles the struggles and challenges of teaching in a 6-week summer bilingual education program in a small town in Oregon. The program was a cooperative effort between a small town school district and Oregon State University at Corvallis. Teachers and researchers who entered into this project looked into the use of bilingual playwriting and puppetry within a primary and intermediate classroom with mainstream students, English language learners, migrant students, and students identified as having special needs. As they collected, analyzed, and compared their data, it was realized that bilingual playwriting and puppetry were greatly overshadowed by other common themes, including the following: the challenges of abbreviated summer school schedules and the pressure from school district administrative personnel to be doing "fun" activities while keeping the focus on math and literacy; negative attitudes among elementary students toward Latino culture and the Spanish language; struggles with classroom management; and the rewards and benefits of team teaching. It was concluded that collaboration between a school district and a university is a good idea. This should be expanded and refined in the future to create quality programs incorporating democratic classroom practices, meaningful and purposeful curricula, team teaching, and continued collaboration between teacher researchers and university researchers. In addition to a bibliography, numerous scholarly references are included in the text. (Contains 13 references.) (KFT)