On life support during the latest round of budget cuts, the Russian-language program at St. Paul’s Central Senior High has produced one of the best non-native student speakers in the country.

Jasper Zarkower, 18, was one of four U.S. students chosen to travel to Moscow in early December for an international language competition at the Pushkin Institute, where he picked up an award for best spoken response.

Zarkower studied French in middle school but switched to Russian as a freshman. He was drawn, he said, to the challenge of learning a language with such grammatical complexity.

But there also was something appealingly mysterious about the vast, frigid land with its onion-domed churches.

Outside of class, Zarkower seeks out grammar exercises online and reads books with English-to-Russian translation.

“By no means fluent,” Zarkower said, he’s reached the point in his language acquisition where he can appreciate how little he can do. So, for now, he’d rather listen than speak.

His teacher, Oksana Cox, said Zarkower “stands out in many categories,” excelling beyond just Russian.

The high school senior has yet to pin down his college plans but he’d like to keep studying Russian. He’s told prospective suitors he might major in linguistics.

“I don’t want it to stop. My goal is to become totally proficient,” he said.

BUDGET TROUBLE

Zarkower is one of about 40 students learning Russian at Central, the only public district school in Minnesota to teach the language.

Many U.S. schools dropped their programs as Russia’s place in the world diminished following the Cold War.

Despite modest enrollment at Central, Cox figured her program was safe. But she learned in May that her program would be shut down as the school district worked to close a $17.2 million budget shortfall for the 2018-19 school year.

“I couldn’t even imagine,” she said. “I thought we were untouchable because we were so unique and so important.”

Officials changed their minds after alumni wrote letters and many current Russian students spoke out at a school board meeting in May.

The budget scare has shaken Cox out of complacency. Back to actively recruiting middle schoolers, she now has her largest introductory-level class in several years, with 21 students.

Cox said she wasn’t concerned about making a living. Central is a 24-hour-a-week job, and she could easily find work teaching English as a second language. But she worries that the decline of Russian education in the U.S. has hurt relations between the two countries.

“We are important,” she said of her native land.

‘FUTURE DIPLOMAT’

Cox left Russia after college to teach in Aberdeen, S.D. before a student recruited her to St. Paul in 1996.

She said she was welcomed warmly when she first arrived in the United States. But the world since has come to see Russia as an evil place and its president, Vladimir Putin, as a sort of monster.

Now, Cox senses fear and mistrust when she tells people where she’s from. Friends, she said, will lie and say they’re Ukranian. She’s shied away from exchange programs, concerned that Russian teenagers won’t be welcomed here after Russia was caught interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Through her classes, Cox aims to play a small part in re-establishing positive relations — to “bring some balance,” she said, to the barrage of negative press.

At the May school board meeting, where students wore T-shirts that read “Future Diplomat,” more than one spoke to the value of the class to international relations.

Olivia Gesualdo, who enrolled at Central specifically for its Russian program, said she planned to join the Air Force, which is looking for more Russian speakers.

“I think the Russian language will be essential for our country’s future,” she said, “and it’s vital that we teach kids it now, before it’s too late.”