Mid-Prairie receives foreign language grant

    Mid-Prairie School has secured roughly $300,000 for foreign language programs from the U.S. Department of Education. The Department of Education announced Monday that Mid-Prairie will receive nearly $150,000 to expand Chinese language courses and another $153,000 to expand Spanish classes.

    School Superintendent Mark Schneider said Mid-Prairie has received similar federal grants in the past. He said his school?s past success is attributable to the teachers who put in the time to write the grant.

    ?It doesn?t surprise me that we got this grant considering how good our staff is,? remarked Schneider.     

    Spanish teacher Edye Freeman was the principal author of the grant. The grant will allow the school to offer Spanish to elementary students from kindergarten to third grade. The federal grant for Spanish classes that Mid-Prairie received is known as ASPIRE, which stands for Aspiring for Spanish in Rural Education.

    The school district now offers Spanish to grades 4-12. All students in fourth and fifth grades are required to take Spanish, and then it is offered as an exploratory course from sixth to eighth grade. Mid-Prairie offers Spanish as an elective every year of high school.

    Chinese is taught to elementary students in two of the three elementary schools in the Mid-Prairie school district. Schneider said that the new money will mean that all three elementary schools will offer Chinese. The program is known as Chinese Educational Experience in Rural Schools. Schneider said that students in two of the elementary schools take Chinese from kindergarten through fifth grade. He said that the Chinese program may later grow to include the junior high and high school.

For the full story, see the April 6 edition of The Washington Evening Journal