- $1 billion Empire State Building IPO: why it won't be like Facebook IPO
- In surprise move, GOP leaders admit defeat in payroll tax battle
- More than 30,000 Germans turn out against anti-piracy treaty ACTA
- Does Obama blueprint reduce budget deficit fast enough? (+video)
- Pentagon budget: Does it pit active-duty forces against retirees? (+video)
- Murdoch media crisis deepens with five new arrests
- How Pinterest combines the best parts of Facebook, Tumblr, and Etsy
- US, China face 'trust deficit' as China's heir apparent visits
You learned Russian - in high school?
A Connecticut public school system cherishes its unusual specialty.
(Page 2 of 3)
Their foreign-language program was formed in 1957 through a $1 million National Defense Education Act grant - an incredible windfall at the time. In collaboration with the government and nearby Yale University, Glastonbury pioneered the audio-lingual method of instruction, which remained popular into the '70s. Federal funding subsided in the 1960s, but the school district has chosen to keep its language program alive using local money.
Today, about 400 public and private schools offer some Russian, mostly at the high school level, according to Dan Davidson, CEO of ACTR, and a Russian professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Some are in areas where Russian influence is heavy, like the new immersion program at Turnagain Elementary, a public school in Anchorage, Alaska. At one selective New York City public school, Staten Island Technical High School, opened in 1988, Russian is required.
This year, 26 high schools - including Glastonbury - were invited to pilot the Advanced Placement Russian test, which will be offered officially in 2006.
But activity in the field is still limited. Between 1990 and 1998, the number of schools offering Russian at both the K-12 and college levels fell by about 50 percent, says Mr. Davidson.
By 1998, no more than 8,000 K-12 students were studying Russian, down from an estimated 18,000 in 1990. Since 2002, he says, there's been a slight increase.
As a whole, foreign-language instruction has suffered in recent years. Twenty-two percent of districts polled in a 2005 survey by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University eliminated one or more foreign languages last year - including Russian.
At Glastonbury High School, however, 93 percent of students take a foreign language, even though it's an elective by ninth grade. Spanish is required in first though eighth grades. Students may switch into French in the sixth grade, and in seventh they can add Russian. Latin is also offered in high school, as will be Mandarin Chinese in the fall.
Around dusk on this particular Tuesday, Glastonbury students gather with parents and teachers at Smith Middle School to welcome this year's crop of exchange students from Ukraine and France.
It's an unlikely public school gathering. Perhaps even more so for the enthusiasm of its students - no one grumbles about being back in school just hours after the final bell. Viktoria Zhovtun and Maryna Chekinova, both from Ukraine, when asked about their host students' accents, smile. "They speak Russian rather good," says Viktoria.
Glastonbury's exchange program - a custom the school maintains with great pride - began in 1989. In 1997, LaPorte participated in an exchange to Kyrgyzstan. (She has also spent summers after high school working for the State Department in Georgia and studying in Uzbekistan.)
At Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols, a Cambridge, Mass., prep school with a Russian program that dates back to 1956, students have traveled to the same school in Moscow since 1988. They claim as an alumus Alexander Vershbow, current US ambassador to Russia, whose first Russian words were uttered at BB&N.
