Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

(from the North County Times, San Diego County)

By GARY WARTH – gwarth@nctimes.com | Posted: Wednesday, June 2, 2010 6:32 pm

Elementary school students in Fallbrook will study Mandarin Chinese, learn English and Spanish through immersion, and become international scholars as part of the district’s efforts to prepare youngsters for a global market.

“I think a lot of people, when they hear ‘Mandarin,’ they say ‘Why would people need to learn Mandarin? This is an English- and Spanish-speaking community,’” said Stacey Larson-Everson, director of state and federal programs for the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District.

But despite the early naysayers, parents of more than 700 students have enrolled their children in Mandarin Chinese classes for kindergarten through eighth grade beginning this fall, Larson-Everson said. The district has about 5,500 students in nine schools.

Fallbrook will be one of the few districts in the county to offer Mandarin Chinese language classes. Mandarin also is taught at Del Norte High School, which opened this year in 4S Ranch as the newest campus in the Poway Unified School District, and Larson-Everson said she has heard it also is taught at Riverview Elementary School in Lakeside and at another school in Point Loma.

While Mandarin Chinese is rarely taught in public schools, federal and state officials have identified it as one of the languages that more Americans should know in the future as China continues to grow in the global marketplace. Jim Esterbrooks, spokesman for the San Diego County Office of Education, said English, Mandarin and Spanish are spoken by about 80 percent of the world’s population.

In January, the state Board of Education adopted world language content standards for California public schools and identified foreign language skills as essential for 21st-century success.

In May, the county Board of Education also supported world language opportunities with a resolution that said the skills would help both students and the region prosper.

The U.S. Department of Education has identified Mandarin, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and languages in the Indic, Iranian, and Turkic language families as “priority languages” that should be taught more.

To encourage districts to offer the languages, the Education Department is offering Foreign Language Assistance Program grants as incentives. Larson-Everson said the Fallbrook distinct is waiting to hear whether it will receive grant money for its program, although it will proceed with the classes in any case.

Larson-Everson said the district will hire two part-time instructional assistants next year to teach Mandarin in the first year. The classes will be taught in all grade levels at all schools, probably in 30-minute blocks taught twice a week, Larson-Everson said.

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