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The Houston school district is launching its first elementary-level magnet offering full-immersion Mandarin Chinese instruction.

The Mandarin Chinese Language Immersion Magnet School, opening this fall at Gordon Elementary School, 6300 Ave. B in Bellaire, will serve students in pre-kindergarten through the second grade.

Students’ core subjects – language arts, math, science and social science – will be taught mostly in Mandarin Chinese, which is dialect spoken in Beijing that was adopted as the official spoken language for China. Some instructional time also will be devoted to developing English skills.

Several factors went into the district’s decision to create the new magnet program, PrincipalBryan Bordelon said.

“There’s the acknowledgement of China’s growing prominence on the world stage, and we are an international city,” said Bordelon, who speaks Mandarin Chinese. “We are developing future leaders of diplomacy, of business, of the community, and that doesn’t start in college.”

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