Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Weighing the public education options for his two children, El Cerrito doctor Michael Jugo felt the East Bay fell short. He wanted them to have an advantage he didn’t have growing up: learning Chinese at school.

“The writing was on the wall that there wasn’t going to be an option for us without moving or paying private tuition,” says Mr. Jugo, 38 years old, who learned Mandarin after college and speaks it at home with his kids, ages 2 and 5, and wife, who is Chinese-American.

Or so he thought. Instead, Mr. Jugo chose an even more difficult path—creating a Chinese-language public charter school in his own county.

After a year of planning, Mr. Jugo and a group of four other families in November received unanimous approval from Alameda County to launch a Mandarin Chinese immersion charter school, the first of its kind in the state.

The Yu Ming Charter School—the name roughly translates as “Nurturing Tomorrow”—is now hunting for a principal and hopes to begin classes in the fall for about 100 kindergarten and first-grade students, expanding over time to include up to the eighth grade. So far, about 120 families have expressed interest or attended meetings for the school.

Read more here.