Group aims to add Japanese-language course

GLENDALE — Scores of parents are recruiting more families to support adding Japanese to the Glendale Unified School District’s popular slate of elementary school dual-language programs.

Organizers said they want to replicate the success of other dual-language programs offered in Italian, German, Armenian, Spanish and Korean.

The Foreign Language Academy of Glendale, or FLAG, has been widely lauded for boosting campus enrollment and academic achievement. In September, the Glendale Unified School District Board of Education accepted two grants totaling $2.4 million for expanding the Spanish and Korean programs.

The size of the grant was unheard of for a district Glendale’s size and a testament to the program’s success, said Joanna Junge, FLAG program director.

“We are nationally recognized for this, and at the center for this, and it is taking off,” she said.

Glendale Unified was selected as the bilingual District of the Year 2009, a Presidential Award given by the California Assn. for Bilingual Education.

District officials said they are open to adding another language.

“If we have the support for it from the parents, we would be totally willing to have other languages,” Junge said. “But we have to have that support.”

Parental buy-in is a crucial ingredient for any dual-language curriculum. For example, in the Korean immersion program, students are instructed 90% in Korean and 10% in English in their first year. That rate gradually decreases, and by sixth grade, classroom instruction is split evenly between English and Korean.

“When they’re young, they can learn it a little bit more effortlessly, and we want to give non-immigrant children or children born here that opportunity too,” said Naehi Wong, the FLAG-Korean director at Keppel Elementary School.

District officials initially conceived the FLAG program as a way to counter declining enrollment. Dual-language classes have helped reverse that trend, but have also helped students excel academically after a five- or six-year period.

Students score as high or higher in English reading and math than students in a traditional setting. They earn high SAT scores and by the fifth year of a dual-language program perform at a high level throughout their academic careers, studies show.