FARMINGTON—Nearly half of enrolled students in elementary schools in the Davis School District are in the Dual Language Immersion program (DLI) and the DLI enrollment is much higher in secondary schools than non-DLI enrollment. 

However, data collected by BDO (auditing firm) in April 2024, shows that retention is high from elementary to junior high but is low as students move from junior high to high school. 

“It used to be that there was a scholarship in the state of Utah where every secondary student who had two consecutive years of language between grade seven and 12 could potentially qualify for a scholarship,” said Assistant Superintendent Dr. Logan Toone in a presentation at the June 16 school board workshop. “That requirement to have two consecutive language classes from seven to 12 is no longer a part of that model.”

So whereas previously students really felt some external pressure to take four language classes in secondary schools that pressure doesn’t exist anymore, he said. “So what we see now is a lot of our secondary classes are populated by DLI students or former DLI students.”

Retention from DLI programming from sixth grade into seventh grade was high in 2024, said Toone. “It’s lower going from junior high into high school programming across all languages.”

Probably the biggest shift is prior to this audit and maybe even a year or so before there were all kinds of different funding models to support DLI, he said. “The state had a specific DLI funding line. We had opportunities to do outreach with the Confucius Institute. We were a Confucius Institute which generated over a quarter million dollars a year which we used to support staffing, curriculum, training and those kinds of things.”

Toone said they had to navigate away from the Confucius Institute. “So we no longer have our Confucius Institute which was made illegal by state code. So as we draw down that funding, the reality is our DLI programs and the classes from a funding resource perspective look a lot like every other class in the school district.”

They get a staffing allocation based on our regular staffing allocation which is great because there are students in the schools and there is staffing for those students, he said. “There’s not a whole lot of extra funds for this. So as we’ve thought about DLI and how we can retain it, it needs to kind of live in this space of existing district funds.”

French (immersion) tends to do a little better overall than in the state, said TJ Strain, Teaching & Learning director. “Then in Chinese and then in Spanish we’re a little bit below the state rate. So all together we hold our own compared to the state in AP pass rates in all three areas. In Spanish we’re a little lower but in French and Chinese we tend to do pretty comparable, even just a little higher.”

There have been some changes at the state level, said Strain. “State-level supports have been removed and funding will be allocated to each LEA (Local Education Agency) to provide support in coaching, etc. Now there will be more control at the district level.”

The only thing written in the law is the 50/50 requirement, he said. “The requirement is that 50% of the instruction needs to be in Spanish or the other language and 50% in English.”

“You mentioned the enrollment going down from junior high to high school,” said board member Kristen Hogan. “Do you know a few of the reasons why that might be happening in our schools?”

“I was principal at Legacy and we did have a DLI program there,” said Strain. “What I started to find is that there's a huge difference as you go from the elementary setting to the secondary setting. Junior high DLI is one class period and it’s way different.”

So there’s a couple of things, he said. “I think one is that maybe a student is going to have to move to a magnet school and that can be something that a student doesn't want to do is go to a different school. They want to stay in their home school.”

The other reason is it’s a lot more academic focused, Strain said. “Not that our elementary programs aren’t focused on academics, but once they get into that junior high setting, the goal is to make sure students pass the AP test.”

“The bottom line is this, we are fully committed to our DEEP programming and we’re fully committed to our language immersion programming,” said Toone. “We’re willing to get scrappy to be able to keep those programs available to our kids.”