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Board weighs cutting FLES elementary language program in FY26 draft to reduce budget gap
Summary
Staff presented a proposal that would discontinue Albemarle’s existing FLES (foreign language in elementary schools) offerings at four schools to reduce FY26 costs; trustees expressed concern about removing programming that serves more than 1,400 students and asked for more analysis and options for equitable design.
The Albemarle County School Board reviewed a staff proposal that would pause or discontinue the division’s Foreign Language in Elementary Schools (FLES) program in the FY26 draft funding request as a cost‑savings measure.
Lauren McClain, assistant director of English Learners and World Languages, said the current FLES program operates at Broadus Wood, Crozet, Ivy and Murray and serves more than 1,400 students. She explained staffing is allocated to provide about 30 minutes of target‑language instruction at least twice per week (roughly 60 minutes per week) in participating schools. Two elementary schools (Mountain View and Woodbrook) had previously ended or paused FLES for local reasons: Mountain View shifted to a full dual‑language model and Woodbrook used an available FTE for literacy and math intervention following retirements.
McClain and trustees discussed research on outcomes for elementary language programs and noted most contemporary research favors dual‑language immersion for the strongest academic and language outcomes; staff said statewide and national literature is mixed, with studies historically conducted on relatively homogeneous populations.
Board members noted the program’s reach — over 1,400 students, more than 10% of the division’s enrollment — and debated the equity implications of maintaining FLES at a subset of schools. Staff said that while FLES supports bilingualism and early language acquisition, the four current FLES schools are in the lower half of the division’s linguistic diversity, so keeping the program only in those schools is not necessarily advancing linguistic equity.
Trustees did not take a final vote on FLES during the March 6 meeting; several said they favored developing an equitable division‑wide design for elementary language instruction and requested analysis of alternatives and cost models before deciding whether to restore, expand or discontinue FLES in FY26.
