Following is a message from Deborah Fernald Roberts, Content Specialist for Foreign Languages:
My sincere thanks
go out to those department heads, teachers, and curriculum directors who
completed the survey I sent out at the end of the summer. To date, I have had
responses from 147 schools and more are arriving every day in response to my
follow-up letter. I am presently hard at work tabulating the results. I know
that filling out the survey was time consuming and required digging up a lot of
information, but I have had several people tell me that they learned a lot about
their own departments in the process. I really do want to thank you for your
effort and time. It is so important that we have accurate and current
information with which to work. If you haven’t had time to fill out the
survey, or if it just hasn’t made your priority list yet, we are still
accepting completed surveys. It is available on the DOE
website, click HERE
for MS Word downloadable form. The results will eventually be presented to
the Board of Education, published and posted on the DOE website.
Below you will
find examples of the type of results that will be available to the public. These
charts give information about programs throughout the state – where they are,
what languages are offered, and how the programs are structured. I chose to
tabulate the ELL data first, as it is one of the questions I am most frequently
asked. Administrators in districts that are considering establishing elementary
programs really want to have this information. I find the results of this part
of the survey to be very interesting, as the towns and districts that have
established ELL programs run the gamut from large urban districts to affluent
suburbs to blue-collar communities to small rural towns. The programs also vary
widely, but it is clear that Spanish is the predominant language. I will
continue to add to these charts as I receive more surveys.
ELL Results
Click on charts for downloadable
PDF version
