Since offering the first class at Disney Elementary, Principal Melissa Kistler said parents have embraced it.
“I can tell you with confidence that I think it’s a smashing success,” she said.
Next year, the district will likely adopt a model that would have the youngest students speaking and learning in Spanish for 90% of the five hours they spend in the program. By the time the students reach the fourth and fifth grades, they would spend half their time learning in Spanish and the other half in English.
Tom Kissinger, director of elementary education for Burbank Unified, has also proposed introducing two more kindergarten classes at Disney Elementary for the 2014-15 school year, with each class having an instructional aide.
The ultimate goal would be to offer two Spanish dual-immersion classes through the fifth grade, which Kissinger estimates would cost Burbank Unified about $1.2 million.
He also said the district is in the early stages of looking into offering a dual-immersion program in Armenian by the fall of 2015.
About 45% of Burbank Unified’s 1,647 English-language learners speak Spanish. About 36% of students speak Armenian. Another 16% of students speak a total of around 70 other languages.
For now, when students in the current dual-immersion kindergarten class advance to first grade, the district will give priority to those students’ siblings to join the program in the fall and hold a lottery for the rest.
One major priority for the district will be to reach out to Burbank’s Spanish-speaking community to attract more fluent Spanish speakers, Kissinger said.
In the current kindergarten class of 29 students, only three students are fluent, and four more understand Spanish, Kissinger said, whose goal is to build classes where half the students speak Spanish fluently.
