By Eileen Oldfield Staff Writer
HILLSBOROUGH — If the Board of Education is going to consider a policy declaring English as the official language, board member Frank Blandino will have to make the motion and may do so at next week’s meeting.
Mr. Blandino posed a question about directing a policy draft after hearing the Policy Committee’s report at the board’s Monday meeting. Committee Chairman Marc Rosenberg said the committee had determined an official district language was unnecessary during his report of the committee’s meeting.
”I think we all agree that our goal is that every student reads, writes and speaks English,” Mr. Blandino said after hearing the report. “I’d like to know what the Policy Committee’s thinking was.”
To direct a policy draft, Mr. Blandino would need to make a motion at the board’s Oct. 21 meeting, which would be put to a board vote. If the majority of the board supported the motion, the policy would be drafted.
The matter came up after Mr. Blandino mentioned seeing Spanish signs in a district elementary school at the Board’s July 21 meeting, and asked about it again at the Aug. 18 meeting.
Mr. Rosenberg said neither the town, state, nor federal government designated an official language for its practices.
”It wasn’t necessarily our jurisdiction to do this,” Mr. Rosenberg said during the discussion section of the meeting. “It changes nothing because we do teach in English. We just felt it was inappropriate to have an official policy.”
The signs Mr. Blandino had referred to are an instructional aid for the school’s Spanish program, and are part of an exercise that has students identify various parts of a building through Spanish rather than English.
Board members Greg Gillette and Wolfgang Schneider supported Mr. Blandino’s position.
”It seems obvious that all our regularly instructed classes should be in English,” Mr. Gillette said. “Today, I don’t think you could find an immigrant parent in our school district that would oppose a full immersion class.”
But other board members questioned whether the district had enough students to require a policy, and whether there was a reason to draft a policy.
”I recall in a past debate the question, ‘why here, why now,’” Mr. Rosenberg said. “As a board member, and not as the Policy Committee Chair, someone would have to tell me why. I hear a request, but I don’t hear a why.”
”If you look at all the (No Child Left Behind) data, we don’t have enough LEP (Limited English Proficiency) people to be counted (under the testing designations),” Steven Paget said. “It’s not a problem we’re having.”
According to the standardized testing data presented earlier in the meeting, the district lacked the 30 students needed to report the test scores in most grades.
The Board of Education will hold its meeting at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the Auten Road Intermediate School cafeteria.

