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While much research has demonstrated that English-only rhetoric negatively affects bilingual education for the children of US immigrants, few studies have examined the local negotiations and discourses that shape the development of multilingual programming for English-speaking students. Across the USA, educational leaders and policy-makers today struggle to develop language programs and explain the benefits of multilingualism. To examine these challenges at the local level, this study analyzed data from an 18-month ethnography documenting the development of an elementary (K-5) language immersion school in a predominantly monolingual city. Framed by neo-institutional theory, analyses focused on leaders' and parents' cultural scripts, or the discourses they employed during bottom-up planning processes. Findings demonstrate that the majority of leaders and diverse parents valued multilingualism as a right and resource for all students; however, parents' discourses also stressed the importance of language as a marker of identity, as well as the importance of having quality academics and safe, secure schooling. In other words, cultural scripts beyond those about multilingualism shaped the implementation of - and parents' choices for - language schools. Such results have implications for how school leaders establish, and sell, multilingual programming.
