$12 million in U.S. Grants to Foreign Language Schools

The U.S. Department of Education will issue more than $12.4 million to schools looking to establish or expand programs in foreign languages critical to national security, officials recently announced. The grants promote the instruction of Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Arabic, as well as languages in the Indic, Iranian and Turkic families.

Recipients include education departments, local school districts and individual schools in 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School is the only D.C. school to receive a grant – about $290,000 – to bolster its Chinese language immersion program.

Here, young students ages 4 to7 alternate between English and Chinese in all core subjects, every day.

"We were thrilled," said executive director Mary Shaffner. The grant money will help the school create its own Chinese-language resources and help fund better assessment tools to measure student learning and teacher performance, she said.

Shaffner said the school's founders wanted to center its curriculum on Chinese, since China has become such a world player and is currently the third-largest economy behind Japan and the United States.

"One in five people speak Chinese," she said, adding that learning the language will help kids compete against other Chinese speakers in the global job force.

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