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(by Kara Krekeler - June 10, 2009)
This fall, 240 kindergartners and first-graders in the city of St. Louis will go to school without hearing a single word of English all day.
Instead, from the moment they arrive at school until the moment they leave, they’ll learn to read, write and understand math and science in French or Spanish.
These kids will be the first enrolled in the St. Louis Language Immersion School, a new charter school based in Forest Park Southeast that aims to make students more prepared for the global climate of the “real world.”
The St. Louis Language Immersion School is just the third of its kind in the state (Columbia and Kansas City both have French immersion schools) and the first to offer a Spanish track. It’s also the first of a planned four language immersion schools in St. Louis, with a German and Japanese school scheduled to debut in the 2011-2012 school year.
Four years in the making
St. Louis Language Immersion School has its roots in 2005, when founder and Executive Director Rhonda Broussard’s daughter was born. At that time Broussard’s family lived in Brooklyn and she assumed that the little girl would attend a French language immersion school there. But later that year, that plan was thrown out when a family emergency prompted Broussard and her family to move to St. Louis where language immersion school wasn’t an option.
Undeterred, Broussard began laying the groundwork for a school here by studying other groups that were working to open language immersion schools, including a group of parents in New York.
“I started watching their process and how long it takes,” Broussard said. “And I started researching why it hasn’t happened yet in St. Louis or if there was even a demand for it.”
To gauge that demand, in 2006 Broussard founded La Creche, a program for French-bilingual families that allowed them to interact through playgroups and other events. Through La Creche, she discovered that not only was there a demand for a St. Louis-based language immersion school, but also that those interested in enrolling their children came from all kinds of language backgrounds, including families that already spoke French, families in which one parent spoke French and those that didn’t speak another language at all but recognized the value of being bilingual. All three factions are represented in the school’s initial enrollment.
Parent April King speaks only English but chose to enroll her daughter Damirah in the school. Broussard said that approximately 80 percent of the kids enrolled in the school come from English-dominant families like King’s.
“We live in this country that’s really good at squeezing out other languages,” Broussard said, adding that that practice is troubling considering the global business climate. “We don’t steer them toward [one language or another]. We just give them a setting to learn. It’s just the fact that they’re learning a second language.”
King said that when she first heard about the school, she was wary; she was worried that her daughter would have difficulty understanding the concepts being taught and, as someone who doesn’t speak Spanish or French, was concerned about how to handle Damirah’s homework questions — students won’t receive instruction in English until third grade and then only during English class.
But after doing some online research, she now considers herself “one of those on-fire parents.” “I’m just excited about knowing that a child at [Damirah’s] age will understand something that adults don’t,” she said. “It’s not being taught the language but being taught in the language that will make a big difference.”
King said that she’s already planning on enrolling her son in the French track in 2010, in the hopes that he and Damirah can teach each other their respective second languages. “I didn’t want both kids to learn the same language. They can teach each other.”
With the grassroots support of parents who wanted to enroll their kids in a language immersion school, Broussard still needed the support of the city and a sponsoring university in order to create a public charter school in St. Louis. That break came in the fall of 2007, when Broussard visited a language immersion school in Kansas City, one of the only other cities in Missouri that is allowed to have charter schools.
During that visit, Broussard learned that Vince Schoemehl, former St. Louis mayor and a former member of the St. Louis Public Schools board, had also recently stopped by the school. Schoemehl said that he had been interested in introducing a Chinese immersion school while he was serving on the SLPS board, but that the project simply wasn’t feasible.
“Knowing a world language and world culture is a great way to strategically position children in St. Louis” for working in the international economy, Schoemehl said, noting that the U.S. is far behind Asian countries in this regard. “You could argue that the rise of the Chinese, Indian and Japanese economies are all tied to the early acquisition of foreign languages in schools.”
After leaving the board, he began advocating for charter schools and discussing sponsorships with the University of Missouri–St. Louis’ foreign language department. In those discussions he and the UMSL department discovered that there was a call for language immersion schools, but that everyone wanted to focus on different languages. So he and UMSL created the framework for a network of schools, St. Louis Immersion Schools, and Schoemehl now serves as the chairman of its board of directors.
Keeping parents involved
Early on, Broussard and her staff sought the advice of parents in determining the location of the school, which is being constructed in a converted manufacturing plant in Forest Park Southeast that’s housed everything from a call center to the Judevine Center for Autism.
Overwhelmingly, parents voted for a location in the central corridor and not too far downtown. Broussard said she plans on using those same directives when determining an additional location in two years, once the school is ready to teach second-graders. At that time, one of the two language tracks will move from its current location and SLLIS will roll out another school for German and Chinese tracks. Later schools would focus on Russian, Japanese, Arabic and Farsi.
Broussard said that while she and the school’s board will look at former St. Louis Public Schools property, she can’t say whether or not taking over one of those schools would be cost-effective or appropriate for St. Louis Language Immersion Schools.
In April the district’s Special Administrative Board decided to reverse a previous decision that would have barred shuttered schools from being used for educational purposes. That initial decision led the city’s 13 charter schools throughout the city to convert other buildings into schools.
“We’ll have to look to see how much work it would take to get them up to code,” she said. “Sometimes it costs more to renovate an old school than to build a new one.”
At this point, all Broussard can say is that she intends to find an additional location that is well-rooted in a community, something she called “a big thing for elementary schools.”
Broussard said that she intends for the school to be representative of the demographics of the city, and is actively working to enroll students from as many neighborhoods as possible. She’s also adamant that parents must be firmly invested in the program, even before they fill out an application for their child.
“You have to come to one of our events or to our office to find out how the program works,” she said, adding that the school regularly hosts demonstration classes in which parents can get a feel for how their children will react to learning in a foreign language.
Shaw neighborhood resident Heather Lake, whose son Isaac will be a kindergartner in the Spanish track this fall, said that she first heard about the school accidentally through “random eavesdropping” at the South City YMCA.
While she originally thought that the school was a summer program, she soon learned the true nature of the school and set about researching similar programs. Ultimately she decided that “the opportunity is too unique to pass up.”
“I am not naive to think that there will not be wrinkles in the first year, [but] I based my decision on the assumption that the school is going to succeed,” Lake said. “It has become very apparent to me that substantial strategic planning and counsel has gone into planning for this school.”
While Lake studied French in school, she said that she and her husband chose the Spanish track for their son because of their background growing up in southern California combined with the opportunity to use the language at home: Lake’s father is fluent in Spanish and her three kids began learning the language in day care.
“I look forward to learning along with [Isaac],” she said, adding that her son is excited about being able to speak Spanish as well as he does English.
As their kids learn a second language, parents will also have the opportunity to learn. Broussard said that in order to help keep parents involved, the school will offer French and Spanish classes for parents.
Regular newsletters and updates, as well as “homework” books in English that feature the same themes being taught in the classroom, are also planned to help ease communication after school hours. Learning to read and write English at home only helps learning the immersion language, Broussard said.
“Face it, the more parents are involved in any school, the better off everyone is, especially the students,” Lake said.
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