For the past 25 years, J.O. Wilson Elementary School’s innovative language program — which includes all grade levels and abilities and pairs classes with French Embassy volunteers — has been a gem in the D.C. school system.

Students have placed nationally in French linguistic competitions. Cultural clubs have formed. And academic performance has soared across the board.

But despite this success, French is nowhere to be found in J.O. Wilson’s budget for next school year, the school’s principal, Cheryl Warley, told The Examiner.

Wilson is one of several District public elementary and middle schools where the budget has left parents and principals fighting to save foreign-language

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offerings.

Warley said she has submitted a petition to Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee pleading the case for the French-language instruction.

“Research shows that foreign language learning increases comprehension and listening skills,” she said. “And you can clearly see that in our school.”

Warley’s counterpart at Aiton Elementary, Peggy Mussenden, told The Examiner that the school’s thriving, decade-old Spanish-language program also is slated to be slashed.

In that program, kindergartners through sixth-graders are exposed to the language once a week.

In 45-minute lessons, the instructor uses Spanish to teach students other subjects like social studies and writing, making its effects far-reaching, Mussenden said.

During each of her eight years at Aiton, Mussenden has had to battle to keep the program.

Rhee’s spokeswoman did not return requests from The Examiner asking how many schools’ foreign-language classes are scrapped in the budget, but she said petitions will be ruled on by next week.

According to a source in the central office, more than a few principals are losing coveted foreign-language offerings.

Students at the middle school level may particularly feel the loss, the source said. Currently seventh- and eighth-graders can get high-school credit for their foreign-language course work.

The students also lose a critical year to practice the language, according to Kristen Hartke, the parent of a seventh-grader at Stuart Hobson Middle School, which is slated to lose Spanish in the fall.

“This is something we’ve worked years to get and it could be gone,” she said.

dlevitz@dcexaminer.com