Va. Program Aims To Meet Needs of Immigrants, Refugees

By Peter Schmidt

Faced with growing enrollments of immigrants and refugees, the Fairfax County, Va., school board has taken the unusual step of establishing programs specifically geared toward students who were poorly educated in their native lands.

The programs, begun at five pilot schools in the suburban Washington county this fall, are part of a comprehensive new plan for dealing with limited-English-proficient students who arrive in middle and high schools with little formal schooling and often have difficulty graduating on schedule.

Before this year, the district's English-as-a-second-language programs assumed "that kids come literate in their own language" and, once immersed in English, would transfer into their new language skills that they learned in their native tongue, said Nancy F. Sprague, assistant superintendent for instructional...