School officials in Fairfax County, Va., understand well that foreign language instruction is critical if today’s students will be ready to compete in tomorrow’s highly competitive global economy.

But, as is so often the case, lofty education goals run afoul of financial realities.

Years ago, the Fairfax County, Va., school system called for all students to start early to learn a foreign language—in elementary school—so they would graduate with some fluency in a second language.

Yet now officials in this Washington, D.C., suburb are weighing budget cuts that endanger this innovative and logical instructional objective. At risk are language immersion programs existing in a dozen elementary schools as well as plans to add foreign language instruction to dozens more.

It’s not a given that the programs will be cut. “School officials say the early programs are crucial to producing a generation of bilingual students,” reported a recent Washington Post article. “Two or three years of high school French typically is not enough to get students beyond a beginner level.”

Any foreign language instructor will tell you the same thing. The earlier you start teaching a second language—and the longer you teach that language—the more likely you’ll end up with a bilingual student.

Yet public schools have never quite embraced that reality. With English spoken around the world, and education budgets lean and getting leaner, school officials are being forced to make tough decisions.

The Cincinnati school system, for example, introduced a variety of languages to elementary classes years ago, but “students leaving . . . at eighth grade have nowhere to continue their Arabic, Japanese, or Russian studies since no [city] high schools offer those languages,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported this fall.

And, according to the New York Times, a New Jersey school system was looking this fall to save money by using Rosetta Stone, an interactive computer program, to replace more-expensive real-life elementary school Spanish teachers.

None of this is to say that educators are giving up on their support for foreign language instruction. The New York City schools, for example, offer courses in a variety of languages, including Vietnamese and Portuguese, and just opened the city’s first Hebrew-language school.

Yet, it appears the nation can’t quite take seriously the need to teach a foreign language to future members of the workforce. Most states don’t mandate such coursework to graduate, and those states that do require only minimal instruction—hardly enough to carry on a dinner-party conversation in a foreign tongue.

So, despite the obvious need—and efforts by public school officials to expand instructional opportunities—a lack of resolve and a lack of financial support are preventing our nation’s schoolchildren from being properly prepared for the future.

As always, when things aren’t as they should be, the ultimate burden falls on the shoulders of local school boards. You know your youngsters need to take a foreign language—and you know they should start in elementary school.

Question is, can you find the money to pay for it? And, if you do, how are you going to explain the cuts you’ll need to make in your arts, music, or all-day kindergarten programs?

Del Stover, Senior Editor