Silicon Valley International School – Mandarin immersion at a recently-combined school

Every once in a while a new school pops up on my radar and I think, wait, what? Wasn’t there another school in that same location? Then I check my list and realize there was. I’m grateful to the Silicon Valley International School for having such a nice history section on its website to make clear how this all came about. So often schools change names or merge and never explain what happened, making it very confusing to those of us trying to keep track.

This is especially important when there are multiple schools with similar names. Nearby there’s also the German International School of Silicon Valley that’s entirely separate. And Yew Chung International School-Silicon Valley. You see how a person could get confused.

There isn’t actually a new Mandarin immersion school south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, but one of the ones that’s there has a new name.

Silicon Valley International School in Palo Alto, California is an amalgam of several schools. The Kindergarten through high school now offers Mandarin, French and German immersion.

It all dates back to 1979, when a French immersion school named the Peninsula French American School was founded in Palo Alto.

That school added a Mandarin program in 1996 and changed its name to the International School of the Pacific.

Fast forward to 2020 and the school rebranded itself as the Silicon Valley International School.

Meanwhile, back in 1993, the Deutsch-Amerikanische Schule San Francisco, a German immersion school, began talks with the International School of the Peninsula to discuss how both schools could benefit from a merger.

Lack of space made that impossible despite more discussions in 1998 and 2019. But then in 2020 “the COVID-19 pandemic compelled a more expedited merger.”

The schools officially merged in 2021.

This one school now offers three distinct language tracks, Mandarin, French and German, in addition to a bilingual International Baccalaureate World School.

And if this all sounds a little familiar, it could be because much the same thing happened up near Portland Oregon, when the German International School merged with a Mandarin school, creating a German-Mandarin immersion program.