Houston BOE hears input on offering foreign language courses

PERRY -- One Houston County resident has seen foreign languages taught to young children elsewhere, and she’d like to see the same in her current community.

Angela Johnson, a former Washington, D.C., educator, saw her grandson learning Spanish in preschool and Chinese when he was as young as 5 years old in the nation’s capital. That isn’t the case in Houston County, where students don’t start taking foreign language classes until after elementary school.

“There’s no reason that we learned it there and we can’t learn it here,” she said during Tuesday’s regular school board meeting.

Johnson cited studies from cities such as Cincinnati, where students in a charter elementary school showed improvement on reading and math scores after taking foreign language courses.

She also said she’s spoken to parents and other members of the community and had received positive feedback.

“I ask that the board also gives their support,” Johnson said.

Any proposal to change the curriculum would need to go through the appropriate district staff in the teaching and learning department. If a plan were to draw a favorable review, though, board Chairman Fred Wilson said he’d back the change.

“I’m in support of it as long as it will keep our students improving and high achieving,” he said.

Also Tuesday, the board voted to set its tuition for out-of-county students at $2,329 per person, an increase from last year’s mark of $2,190 but less than the 2013 figure of $2,354.

Stephen Thublin, assistant superintendent for finance and business operations, said the number had a tendency to change by small amounts from year to year depending on the tax base and state funding.

“It’s how much of our expenditures is funded from local tax dollars,” he said.

The tuition only applies to full-time district employees who live outside the county but choose to bring their children to school there. He said the fee is an expected part of the process of bringing a student in from out of county.

“Some of them will ask, but they understand,” he said.

Before any business could be handled, the board had to name new officers. Previous board chair Marianne Melnick resigned over the summer after moving out of the district, and Wilson had filled her post on an interim basis before being voted to it officially on Tuesday.

That left a vacancy for a vice chairman, and Helen Hughes was elected to step into that role.

“It is an honor and a privilege to serve this school system,” she said.

To contact writer Jeremy Timmerman, call 744-4331 or find him on Twitter@MTJTimm.

This story was originally published September 8, 2015 at 5:13 PM with the headline "Houston BOE hears input on offering foreign language courses ."