Contact: Tammy Lane • First Posted: Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Fayette County Public Schools has been awarded another Foreign Language Assistance Program grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The funding is $300,000 per year for five years, which will enable the district to enhance and expand its offerings in Chinese and Japanese.

One goal is to establish these languages as mainstream classes, much like French and Spanish have been traditionally, said Susan Decker Davis, who wrote the grant along with world languages specialist Alicia Vinson.

Vinson said this second grant will help FCPS further develop its programs and give students more exposure to those languages and cultures.

“It establishes a longer, well-articulated sequence, leading to advance levels of proficiency,” she said.

FLAP provides for instructors and materials in less commonly taught languages. After Fayette County schools secured a grant three years ago, Chinese classes began in 2007-08 at Dixie and Yates elementary schools and Crawford Middle School, while Japanese instruction began at Picadome and Stonewall elementaries and at Jessie Clark Middle School.

“There’s been a lot of support at the administrative level, and parents are really excited about it. That’s been really nice,” Davis said, adding, “We’re seeing demand grow across the district very rapidly.”

Meadowthorpe Elementary teaches Chinese through an unrelated state grant, and Lexington Traditional Magnet School funds its own classes. This year, Tates Creek Middle School and Tates Creek High School also added Chinese as an elective.

The FLAP grant enables the district to provide support and networking for those instructors, too.

“The idea is we can make a professional learning community for these teachers so they’re not so isolated,” Davis explained.

Davis said considering the global economy and that so many businesses in Kentucky have Japanese and Chinese ties, language-proficient students will have a competitive edge when they graduate.  

“That’s a real advantage with someone who’s trying to enter the workforce,” she said.

Vinson also noted that since a lot of business deals are closed in informal, social situations, “if you cannot participate in those discussions, you get left out.”

Altogether, the U.S. Department of Education this year awarded more than $12.4 million in FLAP grants to local and state school systems in 24 states and the District of Columbia. The funds will establish or expand programs of study in one or more critical foreign languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian and languages in the Indic, Iranian and Turkic language families.

Fayette County’s original grant was awarded in part because of the 2020 Vision project, a call to the community to help develop a shared vision for the future of education in this district. During the six-month research and recommendation process, the World Languages Group called for increasing the foreign language offerings in the district and specifically recommended the addition of lesser-taught languages such as Chinese and Japanese.