Editorial: Giving children a language boost

SCHOOL district officials should find out why a promising program that teaches Spanish to elementary school students isn't being used more widely.

An article Tuesday by the Sun's Benjamin Grove showed how well the 4-year-old Spanish program is working in those classes that actually use it, pointing out how enthusiastically students have taken to the lessons. The district created videotaped Spanish language lessons for first- through fifth-graders. There are 60 videos per grade level, with each lasting 15 minutes. The beauty of the program is that the videos are even designed for those teachers who aren't familiar with Spanish.

But Elena Steele, the school district's foreign language specialist who designed the program, estimates that only about 50 percent of the teachers in the school district's 119 elementary schools are actively leading the lessons, even though the district mandates it. According to Steele, some teachers simply turn on the videotapes and sit in the back of the class, while others don't even use them at all. Steele speculates that some teachers may be intimidated, while others don't believe they have an extra hour a week to use it.

The school district should speak firsthand with the teachers and find out why the Spanish program isn't being used. If there is something wrong with the videos or the instructions to teachers, then that should be corrected. If some of the teachers simply don't want to be bothered by it, then it should be made clear to them the importance of this mandatory program.

An interesting twist to the issue is that while it's believed that just half are using the program here, education publishers are marketing it elsewhere in the nation. NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group is selling the program to school districts across the nation for between $750 and $1,195 for each classroom set. The Clark County School District gets 15 percent of the sales, and it says the company has already sold about $750,000 of these kits to other school districts.

Anyone who has waited until their high school years to learn another language can attest to the difficulty in mastering it. Giving children a head start by learning a secondary language, especially one as valuable as Spanish, only makes sense. Mastering a foreign language is a critical skill in today's economy. One of the first questions an employer often asks is whether the potential employee can speak another language, usually Spanish.

Because the Spanish language lessons provide Clark County's elementary school children with such a vital building block for their future, the school district should do everything possible to make sure all elementary schools are participating actively.

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