Wake hopes that Spanish and Chinese language magnet schools can compete with charters
Updated Feb. 18, 2020 with school board vote.
The Wake County school system will add three new magnet schools focused on teaching foreign languages in an effort to compete with charter schools and private schools for students.
The Wake County school board voted Feb. 18 to convert Dillard Drive elementary and middle schools in west Raleigh to magnet schools offering a Spanish language immersion theme. The board also voted to convert East Cary Middle School to a global studies magnet school, although it abandoned an earlier proposal to convert it to a K-8 school.
School administrators also proposed Feb. 18 adding the Spanish language immersion theme to the existing magnet program at Smith Elementary School in Garner. The vote on Smith will be done at a later board meeting.
Wake will request money for East Cary and the Dillard schools in a federal grant it will apply for this year. The district will use local funds if the grant isn’t approved. Local funds would be used for Smith’s program.
No changes would be made to the schools until the 2021-22 school year.
“World language should be a part of every child’s experience, so the fact that we’re able to expand this, I think, is a great opportunity for our students,” school board member Lindsay Mahaffey said Feb. 4.
Since 1982, Wake has used the magnet program to diversify school enrollments, fill under-enrolled schools and provide additional educational opportunities. Magnet schools offer programs typically not found at regular schools, such as advanced arts and foreign language courses.
Attracting western Wake families to magnet schools
The majority of magnet schools are located in and around Southeast Raleigh, which makes for long commutes for families who live in western and southwestern Wake.
More charter schools have opened in recent years in fast-growing western Wake. CE Academy plans to open this year as a bilingual K-8 Mandarin charter school in the Cary area.
Under the modified proposal for East Cary, it would remain a middle school but would begin offering students a daily world language elective. The previous plan was to make it a K-8 Chinese language language immersion magnet school.
“Taking a school like an East Cary or a Dillard Drive will result in getting a lot more applicants from these overcrowded, high socioeconomic western Wake schools,” said school board member Chris Heagarty.
Wake has targeted schools who are struggling to become new magnet schools.
The percentage of students receiving federally subsidized lunches at Dillard and East Cary are higher than the district average. East Cary also has had difficulty attracting students, leaving it at only 62% of its capacity.
Parental interest in language immersion
Administrators said one reason the language immersion theme is being proposed is a 2019 survey of magnet applicants found a high interest in the program. Wake now has a handful of language immersion magnet schools in which some students spend half or all of their school day taking their academic subjects in a different language.
Under the proposal, Dillard Elementary and Smith Elementary students who want the immersion program would take literacy, math, social studies and science in Spanish. The non-immersion students would be able to take Spanish or French daily.
A similar approach would be used for the elementary students at East Cary who are in the Chinese immersion program. Non-immersion students could take Spanish or a different language daily.
Students would continue their language studies in middle school.
“One of the advantages of an immersion program is that students would be bilingual, biliterate and bicultural, therefore giving them greater access to greater success after they graduate from high school and the ability to better communicate with people around the world,” said Sheri Golden-Perry, senior administrator for the Global Schools Network and IB Programme.
This story was originally published February 5, 2020 at 12:29 PM with the headline "Wake hopes that Spanish and Chinese language magnet schools can compete with charters."
