SOUTH DEERFIELD — A foreign language scholarship that was established in 2017 to support Frontier Regional School students has grown, thanks to an additional bequest from a local family.

Each year, the Charles Mark Foreign Language Scholarship awards $1,000, which may be split between two students, to pupils who show academic excellence and commitment to foreign language education. The scholarship was established in honor of Charles Mark, a Deerfield resident who died in 2020, when he and his wife, Paula, donated $70,000 to the district in fall 2016. Of that, $40,000 was dedicated to the scholarship fund.

With the scholarship money placed in a brokerage account, Mark’s children, Judith Rathbone, who is a neighbor to Frontier, and Vera Mark have seen the scholarship grow to a balance of more than $60,000, which Superintendent Darius Modestow said will aid the district’s students for decades to come.

“They donated an additional $20,000 to the scholarship fund to extend their parents’ love of education and giving back to the community,” Modestow said.

Rathbone said her father grew up in Prague and moved to the United States as an adult. Mark taught at various universities around the Northeast before he was named the first chair of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ (then North Adams State College) new anthropology and sociology department.

“He was a multilingual person. He raised his children to study French, German and Spanish simultaneously,” Rathbone said. “He really believed in the power of language study … and (the scholarship) carries on his values and my mother’s values.”

She said they are a family of “lifelong educators” who “believe in the value of public education.” Charles Mark spent his life teaching in various capacities, while her mother was a librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she and her sister have both been involved in education. Rathbone said the brokerage investment account “earned them more money over the years than he had expected” and the family is thrilled to keep the scholarship running in the future.

In encouraging foreign language studies, Rathbone said she and her family want to connect students to the world and help them grow into global citizens. She said she is also exploring funding some form of diversity scholarship because it can further help students address issues at the local and world levels.

“We just want to encourage multilingualism in students,” she said. “I think those diversity efforts go hand in hand with foreign language studies to encourage students and teachers to have a broader outlook on global matters.”

Frontier has continued to encourage foreign language learning in recent years. Most recently, three of its students earned the Seal of Biliteracy, an award given by a school district to recognize students who have studied and attained proficiency in two or more languages by graduation.

“I think we’re going to try and get even more students who speak other languages,” Frontier Spanish teacher Pamela Sharron said in June. “It’s such a gift that parents can give to their kids. The gift of language, a second language or third language, it just unites us as a people.”

Rathbone said she knows her father “would support all of these” initiatives.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.

]]>