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In the Lafayette Parish School System, as in most school districts around the country, there are programs for academically gifted children and children gifted in the arts. There are also programs for children who have developmental problems and need extra help with learning.
But there is little emphasis on programs for average kids, with one exception. Language immersion programs.
A child doesn't need to start out with a special ability or score high on a placement test to qualify for or do well in a language immersion program.
But the kicker is that kids who learn in a bilingual setting, like language immersion programs, have been shown in multiple studies to do better on standardized tests across all subjects than their counterparts in "regular" classes.
The Lafayette Parish School System is considering an expansion of its language immersion program, or language pathways, as they call it, to include more children throughout the parish.
This would be a step in the right direction for the school system on an individual level and at the district level. That is especially true in a time when school officials are looking for ways to bring up scores on standardized tests.
A task force is looking at different ways that expansion could be accomplished. The possibilities include adding more language pathways, expanding immersion, which begins for most at the kindergarten level and ends at eighth grade, downward into preschool and upward into high school and putting immersion programs in more schools and even creating a language immersion school.
Feedback on expanding immersion programs from an online and telephone survey that ended Oct. 17 was favorable, said Angela Morrison, a spokeswoman for LPSS.
Three hundred sixty-four people responed to a "robo-call" phone survey and 480 answered an online survey. It was not necessary to have a child in school to participate.
Of the 844 total respondents, 66 percent said immersion programs are an important component of education, and 83 percent said knowing a second language is important, Morrison said.
Sixty-one percent of the people responding said they believe it should continue through high school and 52 percent favor an all-language immersion school.
The immersion program began here in 1992 with French immersion. Spanish immersion was added in 2005 and Chinese in 2009.
In immersion programs, all subjects except English language arts are conducted entirely in that language. For example, in French immersion, only French is spoken during math class or geography class.
Children today are accepted into the program through a lottery. There are only so many desks in so many classrooms.
But almost everyone who applies gets in, although some may have to be placed on a waiting list for a time.
And it's good that the school system takes the extra steps to make sure everyone who wants to be in language immersion has the opportunity to do so. But if, inspired by the surveys that show that immersion kids get a little extra academic bounce, more parents become interested in the program, it may be harder to squeeze them all in.
That's one reason expansion makes sense.
Children begin in the immersion program no later than kindergarten or first grade. That is the time when they are most able to learn and absorb a language and make it their own.
Language immersion is valuable in several ways. It is an effective way to keep a family or an area's heritage language alive. It is also an effective way to become fluent in a language in a time when the world is shrinking and being bilingual can be an advantage later in life. And it has been shown to improve student performance across the curriculum.
We believe that ideally, such a valuable tool should be made available to all children in all families who want it. Or perhaps it should become a standard part of education.
But as with everything else, funding is a factor.
It may not be possible to offer language immersion to all students in the parish, but the current plans for expansion could represent an important first step that could possibly lead to universal access to language immersion in Lafayette Parish.