The United States draws immigrants from all around the world, and Virginia is no exception. That creates a challenge for public schools, which are obligated to provide an education to all comers, even if they have limited proficiency in English. It’s one thing to find teachers to teach English as a Second Language to Spanish-speaking students, of whom there are more than 66,000 in Virginia, according to Virginia Department of Education data. Spanish-fluent teachers are not difficult to find. It’s quite another to track down someone to teach a native speaker in Eskimo, Middle High German, Efik, Kpelle, Gaelic, Northern Tiwa or Sanskrit, each of which has only one student speaking the language.
For your viewing pleasure, I have extracted the Top 10 foreign languages spoken by limited-English-proficiency students. Click on the link to view all the others.
(Hat tip: James Weigand, who notes: “Taxpayers spend around $110 million annually for LEP children in Virginia. Who ever knew there were this many languages? Or this many LEP students?”
(P.S. There are four Zulu speakers in Virginia schools. I have been a huge fan of Zulu history and culture since my short-lived study of African history at Johns Hopkins forty years ago. I, for one, would welcome more Zulus in Virginia.)
— JAB
