A public charter school in Coppell will become one of the few in the state offering Arabic and French classes to elementary schoolchildren when it opens in August.
Manara Academy’s name means beacon or lighthouse in Arabic, leaders say. And they are hoping that it will attract parents.
“There is a domestic demand for Arabic speakers, and there is a gap in Texas,” said Ehap Sabri, president of the school’s board. “We are providing an edge by teaching these two languages.”
Sabri, an industrial engineer originally from Jordan, said he was prompted to start a school after noticing many young people have weak math skills. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas.
He plans to transfer his daughter from the private Islamic School of Irving into Manara Academy when it opens. The school is located on Heartz Road in a building that previously housed the Christ Our Savior Lutheran School.
Though leaders from the Islamic Center of Irving mosque have promoted the school, board members say it’s open to everyone, not just Muslim students.
“We are not targeting a specific religion or a specific culture or background,” said board member Michelle Alkhatib. “We’re nonsectarian, nonreligious.”
The Texas State Board of Education approves charter schools, which are public and taxpayer-funded. Charter schools are subject to fewer state regulations than other public schools.
Manara leaders are modeling the school after Amana Academy, an Alpharetta, Ga., charter school that says that it was the first public elementary school in that state to require Arabic when it opened in 2005. The school has students whose first language is Arabic and ones whose first language is English.
The school also focuses on “expeditionary learning,” a hands-on approach, which Manara will also feature. It also offers single-sex classes in middle school.
The Coppell school’s leaders hired the Georgia school’s principal, Amaris Obregón, to start the school. She previously has worked as a principal in the Spring Branch school district outside Houston and as a Spanish bilingual teacher.
Manara plans to enroll about 326 students in kindergarten through fifth grade this fall, with plans to expand the school to the eighth grade.
Directors are recruiting students from nearby school districts, including Irving and Carrollton-Farmers Branch.
Sadak Shaik, vice president of the Manara board, plans to transfer his son from the Islamic School of Irving into the charter school.
“I was thinking about alternative education for my children,” said the software engineer, who is from India. “Most of the schools in Irving were really underperforming. From where I came from, we had a lot of emphasis on science and math.”
Irving ISD is rated academically acceptable by the state’s school rating system.
According to the Texas Education Agency, only about 300 students in Texas public schools took an Arabic class last year. At Manara, students will have the option of taking 30 to 45 minutes a day of Arabic or French.
Most of the schools teaching Arabic are near Houston or in South Texas. They include Bellaire High School in Houston, a foreign language magnet school, and Dulles High School in Sugar Land, which has a substantial number of Muslim students.
Only one other school in the area reported teaching Arabic – Faith Family Academy charter school in Oak Cliff, which was rated academically unacceptable last year.
However, Arabic is one of the most commonly spoken foreign languages among children in the state.
Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, a nonpartisan education foundation, said a number of Arabic and Hebrew-focused charter schools have popped up across the country in recent years. Haynes said that with such schools, leaders must be vigilant and careful not to choose language texts that promote any sort of religion.
“It’s challenging to teach Arabic or Hebrew in a secular way,” he said. “But I’m not saying it can’t be done.”
A Minnesota charter school that teaches Arabic was recently sued by the American Civil Liberties Union for promoting Muslim religion in a taxpayer-funded school.
A number of other publicly funded charter schools that teach Arabic and serve a sizable number of Muslim students have been started elsewhere in the country, but have not run into those problems.
In Washington, D.C., several formerly private Catholic schools have converted into public charter schools recently, often prompted by financial struggles. People with similar faiths are looking to establish schools that reflect their values, Haynes said.
Manara leaders say it’s important to emphasize Arabic, especially when government officials are seeking more Arabic speakers. They add that there are limited ways to learn the language, while Spanish dual-language schools are much more common.
“There’s a lot of Spanish already offered in the area,” Obregón said. “This is a need in the community. We’re a much more global society now.”
