THEY WILL be taught “conversational Hindi using authentic written and visual materials” and will be “consistently engaged in interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational modes of communication”, as per news reports in US media.

This Hindi course will be offered as an elective for students who have completed two years of another language at the high school level, according to Sharon Doyle, Bensalem High School principal’s secretary, who adds that if it does well, then a higher-level course in Hindi might also be added. Besides English, District already offers Spanish, French, Japanese and Latin.

Heather D. Nicholas, Kim J. Rivera and Yagnesh S. Choksi are President, Vice President and Member of School Board respectively; while Dr. David E. Baugh and Dr. Monica McHale-Small are Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent of BTSD whose Mission includes: "provide a first class education for the whole child”. It has about 6300 students and about 85% of its graduates go for higher education.

Bensalem Township in Pennsylvania, established 1692, is known as "Community of Firsts", “A Model for America” and “1 of 100 Best Communities in the United States to Raise Children”. Joseph DiGirolamo is the Mayor of this town, which is home to Philadelphia Park Racetrack and Mongkoltepmunee Buddhist Temple. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of US, often travelled to Bensalem and M. Night Shyamalan movie Signs was partly shot here.

Welcoming this development, Indo-American statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement applauded BTSD for introducing Hindi to high schoolers and urged school districts around the country to offer Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, etc., in their schools.

Hindustani is reportedly the fourth highly spoken language in the world after Chinese, Spanish and English and has more speakers than Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, etc.