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Foreign-Languages Acquisition a Vital Part of District’s Mission

WORLDLY VIEW: Dorie Conlon teaches geography in Spanish to Greg Foss, left, Tony Claudio, and their 3rd grade class at Naubuc School in Glastonbury, Conn. The district is viewed as a model for graduating students with language skills and cultural knowledge.

—Christopher Capozziello for Education Week

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

As a diplomat, Richard Steffens has helped open the American Chamber of Commerce of Russia, taken part in disaster relief when floods struck the Czech Republic, and organized the first U.S. trade mission to Baghdad since the fall of Saddam Hussein. In his current posting as a commercial counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, the envoy is regularly called on to speak with Ukrainian government officials, address groups of business leaders in Russia, and give interviews to the press in those countries.

His aptitude in Russian, and several other foreign languages, he says, is “one of the absolute keys to being an effective diplomat.”

Such language skills—which are coming into vogue as essential tools in the global economy—have been cultivated far away from the international spotlight. For Mr. Steffens, 47, they started to sprout in the 2nd grade, when he began studying French in the Glastonbury, Conn., public schools, and later when he took up Russian in middle...