Glacier High French Program Earns Top Honors from National Association

“Bonjour!” Stephanie Hill greeted her students as they walked through the door of her classroom.

Once students crossed the threshold into the room, they spent the majority of the class period speaking in French. On Thursday, they were practicing talking in the past tense, answering the question, “Qu’est-ce que tu as fait hier?” Translated to English: “What did you do yesterday?”

Hill directed them to stand up and move around the classroom, speaking to different partners as they practiced answering the question out loud, before they practiced writing it out, too. As students struggled with a phrase, or wanted to know a particular vocabulary word, Hill would write it on the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. The French word for cotton candy — “barbe à papa,” or “daddy’s beard” — drew a laugh from some students.

Across the country, there’s been a downward trend in the share of schools offering foreign language courses.

But at Glacier High School, the school’s foreign languages program boasts a high level of interest, even though the courses aren’t required for students to graduate.

“I feel like Glacier’s kind of different because everybody pretty much takes a language,” said Alexandrea Carmalt, a senior in one of Hill’s French courses. “So, if you don’t take a language, you’re kind of like the odd man out.”

Students have options to study four years of both Spanish and French, earning college credit in their final year of studying — options which many take. Hill’s classroom ceiling is dotted with colorful stars, each one representative of a student who took four years’ worth of her French courses at the high school.

And the school is adding new offerings in its language department, too. It tacked on an anthropology course offering that’s absorbed into the foreign languages department, along with a German program, each of them some of the only options for high schoolers to take those courses in the state.

For Hill, students’ interest in the programming can be directly credited to the passion of her colleagues. Student enrollment in the program, along with teachers’ dedication and instruction of the French language, both were part of the requirements for the school to earn the highest level of distinction from the American Association of Teachers of French this year.

The award, announced in a Kalispell Public Schools press release at the end of March, marks the fourth recognition of Glacier High’s French program. But it’s the first time the school has earned a mark as “Exemplary with Distinction” — the highest honor the association gives out. Glacier High School was one of four schools across the country to earn that classification, and the only public school in the mix.

Students said the award gives them a sense of pride and excitement about their coursework, sentiments which Hill seconded. She also said being the only public school, and one of few rural ones to earn the award, allows Glacier High to serve as an example for other rural areas as to how they can build a successful language program.

But Hill is clear the award is not only reflective of the work she’s doing in her French classes. Instead, she views it as one that showcases the strong work of all her colleagues in the department, which offers several different ways to engage and inspire students to succeed in their foreign language courses.

The department was an early adopter of the Kalispell Public Schools’ personal competency-based education approach to learning, which centers students’ agency in their school experience, and teachers have honed the practice over the years, helping students gain proficiency in languages via speaking it, reading it and writing it.

Students also have options to earn distinctions for their studies, receiving a graduation cord for completing four credits in one language and two in another while at Glacier High.

And the school has been recognized by the state several times over for its students receiving the Montana Seal of Biliteracy, an honor that goes on their high school transcript and indicates that they have nationally-recognized proficiency in a second language. Plus, students can participate in honor societies for both French and Spanish, and the school offers travel and exchange opportunities for students to see the cultures they’re studying in action.

For sophomore Bailey Bengtson, those opportunities have counted. She went to Paris with her family last month, and said she served as something of a personal tour guide. Bengtson had places she wanted to see and could do some communicating with Parisians thanks to her French education at Glacier High.

The experience proved inspirational for Bengtson, who is in her second year of French with Hill. She hopes to leave high school with the Montana Seal of Biliteracy, and to someday have a job where she can travel.

But beyond learning about culture and the language, Bengtson and her peers described learning to be kinder and more understanding for her experience in Glacier High’s foreign language department. Carmalt, the senior and Bengtson’s classmate, seconded that sentiment.

“It’s honestly hard to explain, but the people who aren’t in a language program and the people who are in a language program, you can tell,” Carmalt said. “They’re kind of just nicer human beings, and they’re a lot more forward, and they’ll talk to you. And as you can see, we have a very diverse group in that classroom, and every single person has been paired up with every single person. Like, I have talked to everybody in there, and there’s no bias or judgment.”

That lesson is exactly what Hill said she and her colleagues hope students take away from their experience in Glacier High’s foreign languages department.

“Global citizens, you hear that term and you think, ‘oh, that means travel,’ right? That means that I’m a global person,” Hill said. “But what it means is that you’re an engaged citizen. You’re engaged locally. You’re engaged at the state. You can be a global citizen and never leave Kalispell. It’s this idea of, ‘I’m a global person, because I’m aware that my story is not the only story.’”

[email protected]