Charter school in Oklahoma City offers Turkish

Sunday, January 1st 2006, 5:18 pm

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- An Oklahoma City charter school and its partner school in Tulsa are the only public schools in the state offering Turkish-- one of the 20 languages the U.S. State Department has deemed critical for Americans to study.

At 15, David Torres, who is already fluent in Spanish and English, is studying Turkish along with 41 other students at Dove Science Academy.

"I don't want to take Spanish again," Torres, a ninth-grader, said.

The fit was a natural one for Dove, which was chartered as a public school in 2001 by Turkish immigrants studying at Oklahoma State University.

Although Dove Science Academy emphasizes science and computer technology, both campuses have several Turkish faculty members, and students began asking to learn more about their teachers' language, said Oklahoma City Principal Yalcin White.

"That was a demand from the students and the parents," White said. "We decided: Why not?"

Dove began by offering a single section of Turkish I in the fall of 2003. When those students wanted to go on, the schools added Turkish II last year. Now both classes are full.

"Every year, it increases," White said.

Spanish enrollment continues to outstrip Turkish by almost two to one, but White said the Turkish classes have a greater percentage of Hispanic students who, presumably, want to learn something new.

Students will have plenty of opportunities to use Turkish in their lives, said Birol Ozturk, president of Sky Foundation, which chartered the two Dove schools. He said an estimated 400 million people across Europe and Central Asia speak Turkish dialects.

"Turkish is not the language of only Turkey," Ozturk said.

At Dove-Oklahoma City, biology teacher Yusuf Kandir doubles as the Turkish teacher. He prefers it to teaching biology, he said.

"I'm enjoying my class. I'm expecting they're enjoying the class too," he said after a morning lesson that focused on a bewildering array of suffixes that change the meaning of Turkish nouns and verbs.

Twenty-one beginning students, clad in jeans, sneakers and the school's red and navy polo-style shirts, took notes as Kandir used a large dry-erase board to show how one suffix changes the sentence "I am studying" into "he is studying" and another transforms "mother" into "my mother."

"It's harder than Spanish or English," said ninth-grader Hayde Luna. "It has accents I don't get."

Kundir said he makes the class difficult by pushing vocabulary and testing regularly. But he said the students are doing well for beginners.

"This is just the first step, basics," Kandir said. "In time, they will get it better and better and better."

For those who do really well, a trip to Turkey in the spring will be the reward. A test in late March will determine who gets to go, and the school will try to provide scholarships, Kandir said.

That motivates ninth-grader Soledad Cardenas, who would like to visit Turkey.

"I'd like to speak to people there," she said.