Young English Learners A Rising Tide in Suburbs - washingtonpost.com: Parents do not show up at Highland Elementary School merely to drop off students.
On a recent morning, one mother arrived seeking help in filling out a job application. Another needed a Spanish speaker for a teacher conference about missed homework. Someone else wanted to know how to get health insurance for her son. Twenty parents waited in the computer lab for a class that would cover little more than how to turn the machines on and off.
This year, for the first time, more than half the students at the Silver Spring school spoke limited English. It's a milestone for the school and for the Montgomery County school system, where the term "English language learners" was seldom heard before the middle of the last decade.
The population of students learning English is rising briskly in school systems in the Washington suburbs. Elementary school students with limited English proficiency (LEP) now number 20,000 in Fairfax, 10,000 in Montgomery, 9,000 in Prince William and 8,000 in Prince George's counties. Just seven years ago, those four counties accounted for 23,000 elementary-grade LEP students.
These newest LEP students are largely U.S. citizens, born within a few miles of their school but raised in homes where English is not spoken.
