Language programs both boon, headache

Glendale Unified officials are assembling an advisory committee to address the growing pains of the district’s dual-language programs, including staffing needs and expansion, as students in the programs move from primary to secondary school sites.

The Foreign Language Academies of Glendale, known as the FLAG programs, launched at Edison Elementary School in 2003 with a single Spanish-language kindergarten class.

The experiment quickly caught fire. Today, Glendale Unified has 1,242 students studying six languages at nine sites, said Deputy Supt. John Garcia.

The popularity of the FLAG programs have been both a boon and a headache for Glendale Unified. The bilingual curriculum has put the district on the map, allowing it to attract families from other districts and private schools.

But FLAG officials also face the challenge of recruiting enough appropriately credentialed teachers to keep up with the student count. They also must tackle the logistical nightmare of expanding the programs into the district’s secondary schools.

Next year, the district will add French at Franklin Elementary School while also expanding into Hoover High School. Enrollment numbers are projected to climb to 1,722, Garcia said. That means that 6% of Glendale’s 26,000-student population will be participating in the programs.

“We are growing at an exponential rate in our FLAG programs, and as we begin to work through this, we need to clearly understand what the paths for those students are going to be in the coming years,” Garcia said.

The Superintendent’s FLAG Advisory Committee will address these growing pains and others, Garcia said. It will be composed of parents from each of the dual-language tracks, as well as district staff.

Applications for the committee are available on the district website and are due on June 4. An inaugural meeting is scheduled for June 19, Garcia said.

Students traveling from all corners of Glendale, as well as from other cities, to attend the FLAG programs are having an impact on the neighborhood identities of some schools. It’s a shift that has caused concern among some parents.

At Franklin Elementary School — home to German, Spanish, Italian, and, next year, French — the district is simply running out of classroom space. In December, officials announced plans to phase out the German program to make room for other, more popular languages. The news triggered an uproar among parents, forcing the district to do an about-face.

Franklin parents have asked that the four languages be kept together at the site, and that the school remain K-6. But on Tuesday, district officials warned that there would have to be compromise.

“Keeping Franklin a K-6 school and keeping all four languages at Franklin — those are tough to do both, and to do it as well as we want to do it,” said school board member Joylene Wagner.