An article from the New York Times describes an outstanding Arabic language program being offered at an elementary school in Iowa.

Zahra Al-Attar drove down the two-lane highway from Iowa City to her morning classes here. As she entered Kalona, population 2,200 and change, she rolled past the harness shop and the veterinary clinic, those reminders of her dislocation. She noticed, too, a horse-drawn buggy on the shoulder, an unexpected cue for memory.

When she was growing up in Baghdad nearly 40 years ago, she had ridden a similar cart to school. On occasion, the driver would let her hold the reins. Here and now, the buggies belong to the Amish. And into their part of Iowa, she had come to teach Arabic.

While the Amish do not send their children to the public schools, considering them too worldly, Ms. Al-Attar’s students at Kalona Elementary are the sons and daughters of Mennonite families who have been here for generations, or of Germans and Czechs who arrived in Iowa a century before the new teacher.

Yet when Ms. Al-Attar bounded into a kindergarten early last month, one Muslim in a roomful of Caitlins and Haileys, the walls decorated with paper candy canes for Christmas, she was greeted with the chirping chorus of an Arabic song. Over the next 30 minutes, until the first period ended, Ms. Al-Attar led the class through the Arabic numbers 13 through 19 and the Arabic words for "hand" and "pencil." Together, they sang an alphabet song, with the letters pegged to familiar objects like a duck, a lemon, the sun.

Two hours later, when Ms. Al-Attar took her first break, she said with a touch of rapture, "Every day, I’m like, whoa, how did this happen?"
...
So last fall, in the second year of the federal grant, Ms. Al-Attar’s peripatetic path delivered her to Kalona Elementary School. Each week, all 230 pupils from kindergarten through fifth grade receive two 30-minute lessons from Ms. Al-Attar...

The Newburgh School District has teachers with native speaker expertise in interesting foreign languages. Why are they not encouraged by the administration to offer innovative programs?