Language-immersion elementary school coming to South End

Building on the popularity of the John Stanford International School, Seattle Public Schools will start a second international elementary school for students wishing to become bilingual.

The district plans to announce Thursday that Beacon Hill Elementary will be designated an international school offering immersion or partial immersion programs in Spanish and Mandarin as well as an English-immersion program for non-English speaking students. The programs will start next fall.

"There's been a huge demand in the last couple of years for Mandarin," said Kelly Aramaki, principal of John Stanford Elementary in Wallingford, which offers immersion programs in Spanish and Japanese. Aramaki has been involved in the development of the Beacon Hill program. "We're thrilled to have it," he said.

The Stanford school, which has about 400 students enrolled in kindergarten through fifth grade, has a waiting list of 90 to 100 families hoping to enroll their children, he said.

Many more don't even wait-list themselves because they live too far from the popular program.

The new school will give more families in the South End an opportunity to enroll in an international program, he said.

Demand for language instruction in schools has grown along with an increasing awareness that children will enter a global work force down the road.

The school district looked at several possible languages, including Arabic, Russian and Korean, but chose Mandarin for the new program based on demand, said Karen Kodama, international education coordinator for Seattle Public Schools.

The school district polled business leaders to learn what needs they envisioned from their future employees, she said.

Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin language skills were consistently identified as pressing concerns.

Mandarin, like Japanese, is a "level 4" language, which means it is more challenging for English speakers to learn than French or Spanish, which are considered "level 1" languages, she said. "But little kids pick it up really fast."

Although building future job skills is one goal of the international programs, an equally important component of both international schools is building cultural awareness.

The mix of children from different cultures is key to both programs, Aramaki said. "You have to have that. So much of this is about just seeing kids from other cultures."

The Beacon Hill program, in particular, will likely draw from a more international base of school children than its Wallingford cousin.

Students in the immersion programs spend half their days studying core subjects, such as language arts and social studies in the foreign language, and the other half of the day studying subjects taught in English. By fifth grade many students have developed strong proficiencies in their second language, Aramaki said.

Students who start learning early also have much more native-sounding pronunciation than those who learn later, or as adults.