Spanish, Yup’ik, Lao and more: Anchorage School District students speak a combined 112 languages

One by one, the teenagers in Mona Grib’s newcomer English Language Learners class at West Anchorage High School on Friday introduced themselves.

“Hello, my name is Ahmed,” said 15-year-old Ahmed Alhezami, reading from a script his teacher put on the digital blackboard. Grib nodded in encouragement. “I am from Yemen. I speak Arabic and little bit of English. I live in Anchorage since 10 months ... I like swimming and gym.”

Next, a 17-year old classmate from Sudan introduced herself. Then, a boy from the Dominican Republic. Another from Russia. Ukraine. Mexico. Venezuela. Puerto Rico.

These students, whose primary language is not English, are not a small part of the Anchorage School District student body. They make up a quarter of it.

Although most Anchorage School District families — 75% — speak English at home, the remaining 25% speak 112 different primary languages, according to fall 2024 data provided by the district.

“People in the Lower 48 have no idea how diverse Anchorage is,” said Grib, who has taught for the school district since 1997. For many years, she’s taught English Language Learners, or ELL, a federally mandated program in every Anchorage public school. “You could take the whole world and fit it in our city,” she said.

‘A real range’

The data supports what many Anchorage parents and residents tout as a badge of honor: that the city is home to some of the most diverse public schools in the country, according to an analysis of 2010 census data.

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“That’s absolutely a fact,” said the Anchorage School District’s ELL program director, Bobbi Lafferty.

Spanish, Samoan, Filipino and Hmong make up the largest speaker groups, according to survey results, with close to 2,000 Spanish speakers and nearly 1,000 Hmong speakers. Yup’ik, Russian, Korean and Lao make up the next largest speaker groups, with more than 370 Yup’ik speakers and over 150 Lao speakers. Iñupiaq, Arabic, Nuer and Albanian each have under 100 speakers.

Grib said that she notices student population trends change based on global events.

“If there’s war in the world, if there is trouble, if there’s trauma, we see it,” she said. “We have Ukrainians and Russians. And before that, it was Afghanistan. Before that was Sudan and South Sudan and Somalia. Venezuela.”

The data came from individual surveys that the school district requires families to complete with their child’s registration. Those surveys, offered in the district’s top seven languages, ask parents or guardians to identify the primary language used in their home, the first language the student learned to speak, and the language used most often by students.

East Anchorage High School, West High School and Mears Middle School claim the most language diversity, with each student body speaking between about 40 and 50 different native languages. But, Lafferty points out, although Anchorage residents tend to assume the city’s diversity is concentrated in certain areas, it expands throughout the whole district.

In 18 of the district’s elementary, middle and high schools, the student body speaks a collective 20 languages at home, the survey shows.

“Every single one of our schools is very diverse, and we forget that because it’s not always associated with ... disadvantage,” Lafferty said. “We get lost in associating that multilingual status as a disadvantage, but it’s such an asset for each one of those schools to have that diversity, to have that range of students in their population.”

The survey is intended to cast a wide enough net to capture the needs of both newcomers and U.S.-born citizens in homes where English is not the primary language spoken, said Lafferty.

Native English speakers tend to think of language learners in a specific way: as people who were born outside the U.S., whose home language is not English, Lafferty said. Maybe we assume that English is their second language. That’s true for some.

“But a lot of our kids are also born in the U.S.,” she said, adding that the primary language of enrolled ELL students is English. “Their parents speak both their home language, and English. Maybe the students’ primary spoken language is English. We have students who are coming in from another country (who) speak five languages, and they’re learning English as their sixth. We have students who have never spoken their language, but their parents or their grandparents speak nothing but that language. It’s a real range.”

Fine-tuning programming

Of the Anchorage School District’s roughly 40,000 students, about 6,000 are enrolled in the English Language Learners program, said Lafferty. Another 1,256 students are in monitoring status, meaning they have exited the program in the past four years.

The school district’s ELL support staff — a program made up of 32 elementary school teachers, 12 middle school teachers, 19 high school teachers, 70 tutors and a handful of staff members who are split among schools — is fine-tuning its approach to encourage English proficiency and, ultimately, to graduate students out of its program, Lafferty said.

This year, in response to family and school feedback, the ELL program added three more “scaffolded” English language development courses at its high schools, to ease the transition between newcomers’ classes and the next level. Previously, Lafferty said, students were going straight from their first year of English language core classes, where they were offered a lot of support, into core classes the following year with native English-speaking peers, and almost no additional support.

“They were failing, they were struggling. They didn’t have the support they needed,” Lafferty said. “So we’re trying to address some of those gaps.”

They also added an English Language Learners tutorial class that is designed for students who are at a higher level of proficiency but still need more academic support, she said.

Another new goal of the program is to graduate students within five years, Lafferty said.

Typically, students acquire conversational English in about three years, and academic English in five, Lafferty said. But historic data from the English Language Learners program shows that the majority of students are not exiting the program within that five-year mark, she said.

“So right now, we’re trying to drill down to why students don’t exit the program,” Lafferty said, adding that Scenic Park and Government Hill — both dual language schools — both increased their ELL graduation rates last year. “Is it a matter of students, when they get to a certain point, they don’t care about the test? Or they’re not taking the test? Or does that really reflect their actual proficiency in all four of those domains? Our goal is to increase that number of students who are exiting in that three-year range.”

On Friday, Grib was asking her students to identify from their workbooks which event happens every day: garden club, or science fair. She’s teaching the teenagers in her classroom not just language, but also culture.

Recently, she said she explained to many of them about Halloween, spirit week and homecoming.

Often, she said, she only hears the impact she has on her students years later, once they’ve graduated out of her program and have a better grasp of English. Last year, she said, she heard from an Afghani student who had once been a newcomer freshman in her classroom, and is now a senior.

“She told me, she’s like, ‘Mrs. Grib, I was like a baby bird coming out of its egg, and I opened my eyes, and there were you and Mrs. Allen to help me,’” Grib said. “It makes you, like, validated. Everything you’re trying to do.”