With just two remaining blanks separatin g them from winning a game of hangman against their classmate Blake Tomco, a dozen fifth-grade French immersion students leaped out of their seats. The word, at that point, seemed clear.

“I know it, I know it,” several students chorused in French, each stretching their arm sky-high toward paper Eiffel Towers hanging from the ceiling. And they did. The word — gâteau, or cake — has been in their vocabularies since kindergarten, when they began the French Immersion Program at O’Malley Elementary School in South Anchorage.

The fifth graders are among 2,848 of the district’s partial immersion students whose burgeoning language skills face a serious threat. In February, the Anchorage School Board passed a budget that slashed about $43 million in funding for the upcoming school year. The cuts — which include more than 380 teacher, staff and administrative positions — eliminate nearly half of the district’s 60-person immersion elementary teachers alone, all but decimating the program, said the district’s World Languages and Immersion Programs director, Brandon Locke. Although the 2025-26 budget doesn’t explicitly say it would dismantle or shut down immersion programs, Locke said that would likely be the consequence.

That’s because the budget calls for a reduction in staff positions, meaning class sizes in neighborhood schools would need to go up by four students per classroom as a result. But language programs can’t add kids to classrooms past first grade, unless they test into the program, Locke said. Also, many immersion teachers don’t have the language skills in English, and often have less seniority than non-immersion teachers, making them among the most vulnerable to staffing cuts.

“If you’re taking it away from them in the middle of a 13-year experience, you’re taking it away prematurely, and the outcomes are not going to be the same,” Locke said about a potential dismantling of the immersion program. Language fluency takes far longer when students are living in an English-dominated world, he said. “They’re not going to have the language skills that their parents hoped for them to have when they put them in these programs.”

Students, parents and administrators are holding out for Alaska lawmakers to change their fate: The school board’s budget cuts came with a promise of near-total reversal, should the Alaska Legislature substantially increase its per-student funding before May 15, the district’s deadline for issuing layoff notices. A reversal would save the immersion program from cuts, but also restore middle school sports and some high school sports, the gifted and talented program and other beloved school programs.

Since 1989

Beginning in 1989 with the start of its Sand Lake Elementary Japanese Immersion Program, the Anchorage School District has offered the opportunity for kindergartners to spend half of their 12 years of education learning in a language other than English. Students currently have the opportunity to lottery into one of eight different immersion programs, including Russian, two Spanish programs, and a German charter school, Rilke Schule. Since 2016, Chinese, Yup’ik and French immersion programs have also come online.

Anchorage has long been at the forefront of dual language programs across the United States, said Gregg Roberts-Aguirre, executive director of a national coalition of language immersion practitioners. Roberts-Aguirre, who is based in Utah, has worked in language immersion policy for more than two decades.

“As long as I’ve been around, Anchorage has been famous for its dual language programs, (for) the quality, the number and the diversity of languages,” said Roberts-Aguirre. There’s not a comparably sized school district with as many language offerings, he said.

In a 2021 Dual Language Immersion Alliance canvass of public school immersion programs that counted each elementary, middle and high school as a separate program, Alaska out-performed states with greater populations, including Connecticut (12 schools), the District of Columbia (13 schools), Montana (one), Nebraska (12), New Jersey (15), Pennsylvania (10) and South Dakota (two).

Even states with far greater numbers of immersion programs than Alaska lack variety, according to Roberts-Aguirre. New York City, for example, has almost 200 programs for a population of more than 8 million residents. But “nine times out of 10, they’re 90% Spanish programs,” Roberts-Aguirre said.

The diversity of language immersion offerings in Anchorage is reflective of the city itself. At home, students speak 112 different primary languages , according to 2024 school district data.

Each program began as a grassroots effort, inspired by community members who are native speakers, or had unique relationships with the foreign language or culture, Locke said.

The educational model of immersion programs was just gaining momentum in the mid-1980s, when an influx of Japanese pilots and their families were stationed in Anchorage with Japan Airlines, Locke said. His predecessor, Janice Gullickson, proposed the idea locally.

The idea took off from there: a Russian immersion program then followed in 2004. Next, a predominantly Hispanic student body at Government Hill wasn’t performing well in testing, so Gullickson wrote a grant to sponsor a two-way learning model, and the school began enrolling half native Spanish speakers and native English speakers, Locke said.

Other programs followed. An uptick of Anchorage families adopting babies from China in the early 2000s led to a community interest in Chinese immersion, Locke said.

In 2018 , less than 50 years after the federal government attempted to eradicate Native languages and culture through Indian Boarding Schools, Alaska Native families successfully secured the state’s first Yup’ik immersion program.

How it works

Immersion school programs are embedded within neighborhood elementary, middle and high schools throughout the district. The programs operate in a split-day model: Students spend half of their day in English — where they learn language arts and math — and the other half in their target language, where they learn science and social studies.

High school immersion students take two classes per day entirely in their foreign language. At each level, students take standardized STAMP tests in order to advance, Locke said. At the end of their 12 years of education, students must pass an international standardized assessment exam in their target language that proves proficiency in speaking, listening, reading and writing, in order to receive a seal of biliteracy, Locke said.

ASD immersion graduates have gone on to live in respective countries, and hold jobs that benefit from their language skills, Locke said. Research consistently has shown that students who can speak and write in multiple languages have cognitive and academic advantages over their monolingual peers. ”Because they are able to switch between languages, they develop more flexible approaches to thinking through problems,” according to “ The Benefits of Being Bilingual ” fact sheet from the U.S. Department of Education.

Whitney Wigren graduated from the Japanese Immersion Program in 2005. She’s spent the last 15 years working in national intelligence in a job she says she would not have gotten without both her language skills and cultural understanding. Now, her three children attend the same immersion program.

“It makes students so unique and so marketable when you get to the workforce,” Wigren said. “It literally changed my entire life.”

On a recent school day, model volcanoes decorated a back table in fourth and fifth grade French immersion classrooms. Fifth grade French teacher Lea Tissot, who came to Anchorage from Lyon, France, on a two-year teaching visa, said her students were learning about volcanic eruptions. Evidence of a social studies lesson hung on the back wall of the classroom: Her class had been mapping in real time skippers competing in The Vendée Globe, a round-the-world sailing race that takes place every four years.

In 2024, the French government awarded Anchorage’s French Immersion Program with an award recognizing it as a foreign educational institution that advances French language and culture.

Tissot said that her students are worried about potential cuts to their program, and how it could affect the advancement of their language skills.

“They always (tell) me, like, ‘Oh, in 10 years, I will be super fluent. I will come to France. I want to study in France. I want to do an internship in France,‘” Tissot said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I hope so.‘”

Eleven-year-old Laney Callaway, who has been in the immersion program since kindergarten, said knowing French helps her feel smarter. Last year, she took a trip to Paris with her family, and she and her sister acted as their parents’ translators.

“Normally I’m the one who doesn’t know that much in my family, because I’m the youngest,” she said. But in Paris, the roles were reversed. She was charged with ordering food at restaurants. “There was this one waiter, and he thought I was really good at French,” Callaway said. “He came back with a bunch of chocolates to give to us.”

The threat

If the current budget cuts are reversed, there’s a risk that it will be too late, Locke said.

Locke will still have to fill at least four French teaching positions for the next school year, and a few more upper-level Spanish language positions, he said. The process of interviewing teachers from abroad and processing their visas should have already begun, Locke said, but he’s currently in a holding pattern while districts across the state wait to hear from the Legislature.

“My worry is that we’re not going to have an answer from the state by the time we actually need to bring people over on visas,” he said. “If I start to look for people in July and August, they’re not going to be available.”

Still, Locke is optimistic.

“I’m incredibly hopeful we will receive funding from the Legislature. If we don’t, our immersion programs will suffer,” he said. How exactly those cuts would look remains to be seen. Locke clarified that Rilke Schule does not face the same threats of cuts that the other seven programs do because it’s a charter and therefore responsible for its own budget.

“Would we look at it by cutting a little bit from everybody so that all programs suffer? Or, would we look at it — and it kills me to say this — but potentially closing one or two programs completely if they are the least enrolled, to save the programs that are flourishing in terms of their enrollment?”