Escuela Key Elementary
In 1986, Key School accepted the first class of students to begin the two-way partial Spanish immersion program.
Key School was originally named after Francis Scott Key, author of our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner.” Key School or Escuela Key was one of the pioneers in the United States in two-way immersion programs. The immersion program was established at Key School in 1986 with a first-grade class, and one grade was added each year as the initial cohort advanced. Full-day kindergarten was added in 1991. In keeping with the two-way model, each class includes native Spanish speakers and native English speakers.
In 1968, Francis Scott Key Elementary was built as an “open space” school located at Key Blvd and N. Veitch Street. It was a neighborhood school that primarily housed English-dominant children; there was very little diversity until the 1980s.
In the mid-1980s the demographics of Key School were changing, and the student population was much more diverse than it had been in previous years. The school was experiencing the loss of families who decided to move out to private schools or leave Arlington County and move west to Fairfax. The principal at the time, Dr. Paul Wireman, traveled to other school districts to investigate programs that would keep the families from leaving the school. One of the schools he visited in Cambridge, MA was the Amigos immersion program. Amigos was based on the French-Canadian system of bilingualism and immersion, which experienced great success.
In 1986, Key School accepted the first class of students to begin the two-way partial Spanish immersion program. APS kindergarten classes were half-day so the following year a federal grant was written and approved to have full-day kindergarten at Key School so that five-year-old children could begin the dual language program and have a full-day to split between the two languages, Spanish and English. Key School was the first school in APS to have a full-day kindergarten. The school applied and received a federal grant allowing two kindergarten classes with the two-way 50-50 model. Each year, the program expanded into the next grade level, and the DLI program within the regular elementary school program flourished.
In 1993, Arlington Public Schools faced school crowding problems. Due to Key’s success, APS opened a small satellite program at Reed, called “Key West”. There were about 300 children in that DLI program. Between Key and Key West campuses, 850 students studied two languages. In 2021, its name was changed to Escuela Key after the program moved to its new location at 805 N. Edison St, 22204.
The Dual Language Immersion program at Escuela Key is one of the most highly recognized programs on the East Coast and over the years hosted dozens of schools from throughout the U.S. and other countries interested in forming
Dual Language Immersion programs in their communities. The original work by APS in dual language programs seeded the development of this amazing language program option to an ever-increasing number of English-dominant, bilingual, and native Spanish-speaking students.
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