ST. LOUIS, Mo. – A St. Louis “language immersion” school is having an identity crisis, caught between parents who want the school to stick to its roots with the majority of lessons in a second language, and education bureaucrats who think the approach makes it harder for black kids to learn.

The unique St. Louis Language Immersion charter schools were designed to start students studying in a second language in kindergarten and include schools for French, Spanish, and Chinese. The charter schools serve about 750 students through eighth grade, and many are low-income black students.

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The schools’ problems stem with how some of those students score on state standardized tests.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

About 73 percent of white students who took state tests scored proficient or advanced in English language arts, while just 26 percent of black students did so.

About 61 percent of white students scored proficient or advanced in math, while just 17 percent of black students did so. Black students make up more than half of students here, and about two-thirds of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, a measure of poverty.

Rhonda Broussard founded the schools in 2009, and she was removed by the school board in 2015 over a variety of issues, including financial and operations problems that plagued the schools for years. The school board installed a new president, Lilith Werner, who is now questioning the merit of a focus on language immersion as the schools’ charter authorizer, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is pressuring the school board to address a widening achievement gap, the news site reports.

Bill Mendelsohn, who oversees charter operates for the University of Missouri-St. Louis, berated board members at a recent meeting over academic performance, and described the achievement gap as the “most disturbing” problem.

Mendelsohn said the charter schools’ language immersion concept is “inspiring” but “we must ask, ‘Who has not benefited? And the answer is: Over half of the students who attend.”

When Broussard left the schools, the overall state performance score dropped like a rock, from a 92 percent in 2015 – well above the 75 percent threshold for full accreditation – to a 66.4 percent in 2016, which put St. Louis Language Immersion in the “provisional accreditation” category, St. Louis Public Radio reports.

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Teachers at the schools believe it’s because many students come in without basic literacy skills in English, which makes it harder for them to dive into lessons in another language, which makes up 80 to 90 percent of the coursework.

“We know that immersion can work when you have literacy skills in your native language and you are able to transfer them,” Arlene Galve, CEO, told the Post-Dispatch.

“Many of our students are coming to kindergarten with a lot of different needs and they are coming with very weak literacy skills, and sometimes, they are not even ready in their own language to be acquiring a second language.”

The charter schools added more English instruction to the curriculum, as well as after school activities, but Werner, the new president, is pushing to move away from the focus on language immersion, which is irking a lot of parents.

“We are not serving all children the way we need to,” Werner said. “It’s not only an accountability issue, which of course is important. I also think it’s a moral issue, whether we’re preparing people to be biliterate and bilingual as we say they are.”

Parents who enrolled their children in the schools specifically for the language immersion aspect aren’t at all impressed with the direction things are heading.

“Now I hear about test scores and infrastructure inefficiencies and struggles, and I’m not mad at the people who need to make changes so that (this school) is sustainable,” parent Natalie Bishop told board members Wednesday. “But where is the person excited about the vision of an immersion school?”

“I was promised school immersion … . And I was promised native Chinese speakers,” said parent Hilary Scott. “From everything demonstrated to us Chinese parents in the last five months, it is clear that our agreements are in jeopardy.”