While getting a tour of the John Stanford International School to learn about their planned playground improvements (a story for another day), we found out something we didn’t know: JSIS is the entry point for foreign elementary students new to the country.
When a child moves from another country to Seattle, rather than just throwing them into a public school classroom and leaving them to figure out the whole system by themselves (e.g., the days are divided into periods, the school will or won’t feed you lunch, this is how you address your teachers, this is what’s expected of you), they first spend about six months at JSIS getting oriented in special classes before joining the classes in their neighborhood schools. They’re separate from the rest of the JSIS program, but share the school facilities.
Students come from the Karen tribes of Thailand, from East Africa, China and more, about 50 or so of them at any given time.
Now you know.
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This is a “Bilingual Orientation Center”, or “BOC”. There’s at least one more elementary BOC, at Thurgood Marshall, and a secondary BOC at Old John Hay.
The BOC is a great fit with an international school, of course! The BOC students get main-stream students who are primed to appreciate an international background, and the main-stream students get that extra exposure to emissaries from the wide world. Also, there’s some graduation from the BOC program into the immersion program for students from Spanish-speaking countries (there’s none that I know of from Japanese countries), though not as much as it was hoped at the outset. (The immersion program has the problem of it being very hard to transfer into, after 1st grade except for students who come from a home where Spanish is spoken, so it’s hard to fill vacancies from students moving out.)