Make Portland a multilingual city within 30 years

I’m the daughter of a French immigrant dad and an American mom. Dad moved to the US in 1978—when “fitting in” meant leaving your language and culture behind. He loved the Beach Boys, John Denver and cowboy hats and told his 11 siblings back in France that he was basically forgetting how to speak French. So, I didn’t grow up speaking it, even though I desperately wanted to.

I learned French in high school and college, and now I speak advanced conversational French. It's not my native language but I feel fluently at home listening and engaging. It’s been an extraordinary gift: feeling at home in more than one language opens the door to feeling at home anywhere in the world.

My kids are getting an even better deal. They’ve been in a French immersion public charter school here in Portland since kindergarten. As fifth and second graders, their accent is already better than mine, and they’re more nimble, imaginative thinkers than I ever was at that age. I fully attribute this to their bilingual education.

Meanwhile, every European kid their age is learning at least three languages as a baseline. Yet in Portland, multilingual education is still a privilege—either you win the charter lottery, like we did, or you pay for private school.

What if we decided to make Portland a multilingual city within 30 years? This could be the single most powerful investment we make in our children’s future as global citizens and leaders.