MANCHESTER, N.H. – In addition to pioneering a type of school never seen before in New Hampshire, the Manchester School District may also be pioneering a new type of report card for those schools.
During the Feb, 10, 2026 Board of School Committee’s Committee on Teaching and Learning meeting, Manchester School District Executive Director of Multilingual Leaner Education Wendy Perron provided an overview of a proposal that would create school specific report cards for the district’s dual-language immersion schools.
A concept that was initially floated in 2020, the dual-language immersion model was introduced at Bakersville Elementary School in 2024 and at Webster Elementary School in 2025 in Spanish and French, respectively. In the dual-language immersion model, students learn in their native language for half of the day and in a target language for the rest of the day, including subjects unrelated to the target language.
With the unique teaching model compared to the district’s other schools, Perron argued that current report cards do not accurately reflect student growth in two languages within the dual-language immersion, or DLI, environment.
“Our existing elementary report card was developed for monolingual classrooms,” Perron told the committee. “It does report on students’ academic achievement and growth in literacy. But what the DLI team noticed during year one of implementation was that the report card didn’t really allow us to report to parents how students were developing their bilingualism and biliteracy or how they were doing with sociocultural competence.”
The tentative report cards mark another step in the district’s attempts to transition from grade-based report cards to mastery-based report cards, where students are judged on their understanding of a particular subject rather than just the ability to regurgitate information.
Under the revised report card, “English Language Arts” will be renamed “Bilingual Biliteracy Development” to align with the program’s instructional model.
Several kindergarten and first-grade standards were revised to eliminate language specific to English phonics rules that do not apply in Spanish or French. For example, rhyming — a common English literacy strategy — was removed from kindergarten foundational skills because Spanish has a more transparent sound-symbol relationship.
Similarly, references to “short vowel sounds” were broadened because Spanish has five vowel sounds compared to 15 in English. In first grade, standards referencing “final e” sounds were rewritten in more general language so that skills could apply across languages.
In addition to academic revisions, the report card will now include expanded sociocultural competencies. The heading “Citizenship and Social Skills” will be updated to “Citizenship and Sociocultural Skills.”
New standards include statements such as:
– “I work and play well with people who are like me and different from me.”
– “I can be friendly to all peers.”
– “I want to know more about other people and how our lives and experiences are the same and different.”
To avoid overwhelming families, one existing behavioral standard — “I pick up after myself” — was removed, with the team noting that it could be measured under broader classroom expectations.
Perron said that a pilot program testing the report cards had been met with support.
Members of the committee were supportive of the idea, with Ward 1 Board of School Committee Member Julie Turner recommending that efforts be made to ensure that the grades and the languages that those grades reflect be made clear, with Parron agreeing.
The report including the proposal was passed without comment during the Feb. 18 Manchester Board of School Committee meeting.