At this point it’s a plan to make a plan, but advocates of bilingual educational programs were encouraged recently by the inclusion of dual language in the Shawnee Mission School District’s newest five-year strategic plan.
According to the timeline laid out at the board of education meeting on June 24, district officials would begin around January, 2026, to collect data and explore how dual language might be implemented.
Turning it into a reality after that would require policy changes and votes by the school board.
Parents have been lobbying for dual language
The strategic plan is a wide-ranging list of the long-term goals of the district through 2029.
Dual language, an immersive introduction to a second language often beginning in the early elementary grades, is an idea that has been championed by a growing number of parents in the district.
The group Facebook page, Dual Language SMSD, says the goal is to get opportunities for continuous K-12 bilingual programs into the district, which does not currently have them.
Some other Johnson County schools districts do currently offer dual language, including a Spanish-language program in Olathe and Chinese in Blue Valley.

“Going in the right direction”
The new strategic plan does not promise that dual language will become reality. But it does assign district officials to begin gathering data on how much interest there is and how it might eventually look.
“What we have today is a plan to make a plan,” said parent dual language advocate Andy Rondón, of Overland Park.
Rondón has spent more than a year presenting the idea to parents in the district and raising awareness.
When the effort started, he said, “it was not on the district’s radar at all and nobody was talking about it. There was absolutely no plan for it to happen.”
“Creating action steps to make it happen is hugely important. It’s a bit longer of a timeline than what we wanted, but it’s going in the right direction,” he continued.
Elizabeth Ault, another organizer of the group and an English as a Second Language teacher at Shawnee Mission West, also was hopeful.
“I’m very encouraged,” she said. “The door is open and we feel our job right now is to keep the door open and accessible.”
A five-year horizon
Dual language programs vary from district to district, but they usually involve some immersive language beginning in certain elementary schools and often incorporated across subjects.
Advocates say the immersive method makes the language easier to learn, and that knowing a second language can improve performance in other subjects and forge stronger cultural bonds among students.
Ault and Rondón each participated in the district’s teams and committees that drew up the strategic plan over about six months.
Ault said she was surprised to see dual language as a sub-category in the plan.
“It was a nice surprise to have it be there and be its own action idea,” she said.
The strategic plan committees that included parents and community stakeholders are now finished and the main work will be up to the district administrators. Work on dual language and myriad other goals is spread out over the five years of the plan.

What happens now?
The next challenge for the parents pushing for dual language will be keeping people engaged and excited, Rondón said.
“It does feel like there is a bit of a pause coming up,” he said.
But he added that the district’s experts will be the appropriate people to find the right data and figure out the kind of details that were beyond the time constraints of the citizen/school district teams.
District officials can also look into more options for exposing students to language study, such as offering world language as a special class along with music, art, physical education and library, he said.
But in the meantime he and Ault said they will do their best to keep the idea in the front of the public’s mind.
“We’re going to keep talking about it so when our time comes, then we are very prepared to make decisions quickly and effectively,” Ault said.