Madison Metropolitan School District officials will unveil plans to offer a dual-language program at Leopold Elementary beginning next fall.
The new curriculum for the south side school would include education in English and Spanish, and discussion of the plan is anticipated at a Madison School Board meeting on Feb. 2.
Three sections of kindergarten classes with approximately 48 children will become part of the program, which will progress one grade level each school year until the program’s initial students finish fifth grade. The school will join east side’s Nuestro Mundo as the second public school in the Madison Metropolitan School District to offer a dual-language program. Nuestro Mundo, a charter school, has been in operation for five years.
Eight of Leopold’s 44 classrooms are bilingual, and the school is a perfect fit for the immersion program, according to Assistant Superintendent Sue Abplanalp.
“We know the benefits of dual-immersion programming,” Abplanalp said. “This is a perfect place to begin such a program because we know could get the enrollment that we need to make it a viable program for the future.
“We want native speaking Spanish children as well as non-native Spanish children, and that’s the population that is at that building,” she said.