The Bay Area is a melting pot of languages and culture, and local schools are no exception.
But one Arabic-language school is standing out for a different reason:the interest it's drawn from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Fame Public Charter School in Fremont,
Calif. hopes to become the nation's first Arabic-language immersion
school. The school aims to make learning fun for students who may have
felt they didn't fit in at other schools because of their language,
religion, or dress. (Some students, for example, wear a head scarf.)
The
students speak 15 different languages, including Arabic, Urdu, Pashto,
and Farsi; only 3 in 10 speak Arabic at home. And while Arabic-language
classes are taught here, the rest of the curriculum is in English.
"There
was a large population of students, particularly in the East Bay, who
were not developing their English-language skills well because there
weren't programs for them,"said Maram Alaiwat,
Fame's founder and CEO. "We have been re-designating students into
English-language fluency faster than the rest of the state. The results
are astronomical."
Alaiwat is taking on a challenge, both in teaching English and Arabic to her students. Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn. But it is spoken by an estimated 600 million people worldwide, and could be more common than English by 2050.
For many, though, there's a more immediate interest in Arabic-language skills, and that's the troubled state of the world.
The FBI and other intelligence agencies have struggled to recruit enough Arabic-speaking personnel.
But FBI agent Joseph Schadler said that has nothing to do with his agency's support of the school.
"The
fact that they teach Arabic never entered into our calculations on
this,"said Schadler. "We are always looking for pepole to become
FBIagents -- it doesn't matter if they are in a French immersion
school, a Tenderloin community school, or at Fame."
Fame students are mentored by FBI agents to make positive choices in life.
"If
some of them go on to be FBI agents or FBI support employees or
President of the United States, then we'll have gone far beyond
succeeding,"said Schadler.
First published on NBCBayArea.com.
