U.S. Education Department grants will help two Oklahoma schools teach a growing language and rescue a dying one.

Hennessey and Hominy public schools will receive five-year, dual-language grants from the Education Department’s Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs. The grants will be used to teach elementary students to become fluent in English and a second language – Spanish for the Hennessey students and Osage for Hominy students.

Jeff Smith, grant writer and evaluator for the Osage County Interlocal Cooperative, of which Hominy is a member, said he chose the Osage language when writing the grant because of the county’s historically Osage culture.

The students will develop an awareness and esteem for their own language and culture. They also will “rescue a language that is on the verge of being lost,” he said.

“There’s research out there that shows every indigenous language to North America is in danger of becoming extinct in the next 50 years,” Smith said.

Education Department officials announced in December that they would award these grants to 71 elementary schools in the nation.

“Dual-language programs help bring children closer together through the very thing that has kept them apart – language,” said Richard Riley, who was Education Secretary at the time. r said in a news release. -RT “I am delighted that we are creating more of these programs and that we are closer to realizing our goal of having 1,000 such programs by 2005.”

Hominy will receive $ 226,000 in the first year, 2001-02, and should receive about $ 1.1 million in the five years.

Smith said the first priority of the program is to promote English proficiency, which is vital in a school with so many American Indian students. The program will serve 310 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, of which 55 percent have an American Indian background in various tribes.

In Hominy, the program will help train new and current teachers. It also will help parents work with their children, Smith said.

Plus, since the Osage language is not as widespread as languages such as Spanish, the school will hire tribal elders from the Osage community to teach students the language and culture, he said.

Administrators will plan the first year. In the second year, students will begin to see benefits, Smith said.

Hennessey will receive $ 213,000 in the first year, and the school’s grant also should total more than $ 1 million. In the fall, the school will hire a dual-language specialist and a certified bilingual teacher to serve as a home-school liaison, Superintendent William Stokes said.

Stokes said Hennessey chose Spanish because 25 percent of the elementary students have Hispanic backgrounds.

The program will begin in pre-school and kindergarten in 2002-03 and expand to the fourth grade by the next school year.

It will have dual benefits for students, Stokes said.

For example, Hispanic students may have trouble learning English at the same time as the subject matter, he said. However, if they can learn other subjects using Spanish, they can concentrate on English by itself.

“This makes the transition easier,” Stokes said.

The United States continues to trade with Spanish-speaking countries. So it is important for English-speaking students to learn to communicate so that they can have those skills as adults, he said.

“I think we’re just giving our kids an advantage if we give them that opportunity to pick up that second language,” Stokes said.

The goal is for teachers in sections at each grade level to instruct students in English half of the time and Spanish the rest of the time. Students still will have the option for completely English sections as well.



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