11/07/2025
Big shoutout to Cincinnati Public Schools and their powerful way of growing global citizens.
In the lunch room at Academy of World Languages, a PreK–8 CPS multilanguage school, a cluster of fourth grade girls sit around a table. One speaks English and Arabic, one speaks Spanish, and one speaks an African language, but the conversation is in Spanish. Principal Jackie Rowedder observes the interaction with wonder, noticing the English and Arabic speaker is parsing together bits of Spanish in order to participate in the conversation. When asked why she was attempting Spanish, a language that wasn’t in her curriculum, she answers, “That’s my friend, so I’m learning Spanish.”
Multicultural moments like these happen daily throughout CPS’s three multilingual schools, which include Academy of Multilingual Immersion Studies and Fairview-Clifton German School, in addition to Academy of World Languages. And while there are similarities between these three schools—they all offer preschool, they all offer a more extensive language experience than a traditional public school curriculum, and they all deliver the benefits of a bilingual foundation—they are also distinctly different in their approaches and offerings. https://ow.ly/eitm50XnM0t
