Mounds View district expands language classes

Spanish is back in Mounds View district middle and elementary schools.

Discontinued at the middle school level seven years ago, and offered on only a spotty basis in the elementary schools, Spanish will be offered starting next year in fourth and fifth grades in the elementary schools, and sixth-through-eighth grades in the middle schools. It will be required study for all students.

The district will also offer Mandarin Chinese at the high school level, provided there is enough student interest.

Mounds View Superintendent Dan Hoverman said the move brings Mounds View back into the ranks of comparable Twin Cities districts, most of which offer world languages at the middle school level, and many of which offer them in elementary school.

"There had been concerns and questions from numerous parents about why we didn't have [world language] opportunities for kids in the middle and elementary schools," Hoverman said. "That had been a question that the board had heard and I had heard for the last number of years. ... We just felt it was time."

A task force was created to study the issue last March. A survey of districts that lead the metro in a number of academic achievement measures, found Mounds View suffering by comparison.

"We were one of the few that didn't have a [world languages] program at the middle schools," Hoverman said. "At the elementary school level, it was a little more checkered as to who had it, and who didn't."

"When we looked at the demographics, both regionally and in the state ... and looked at the representation of students within our system, it just seemed to us that Spanish was becoming such a predominant part of our culture," Hoverman said. Plus, it helped that the high schools were already offering Spanish.

Even with the return of world language to the elementary and middle school course of study, that is still a bit of a decline from years past, when not only Spanish, but French and German were offered in the middle schools. Those, however, were only offered in the eighth grade. World languages were discontinued at the middle school level for several reasons, including budget woes and the difficulties of sharing world language teachers among the three middle schools.

Since the district decided that it would not spend more to reinstate world languages, that means something else has to go.

Hoverman said family and consumer science will no longer be offered at Mounds View middle schools. Arts offerings at one of the middle schools will be downscaled from three quarters to two quarters. There will also be some reduction in technical education and business education.

"Kids will get the same experiences, but it may be slightly less in the course of the three years," Hoverman said. He said the district is currently conducting a search for Spanish teachers, although some teachers in the district would be qualified to teach it.