Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

The Chinese American International School, founded in 1981, is the oldest Mandarin immersion school in the country and, as far as I can tell, the world.

It’s long been split between multiple buildings, for preschool, grade school and middle school, to accomodate its growing student population. Until last year the grade school shared a building with the French American International School.

This year, CAIS moved into a new campus on San Francisco’s west side, into the building of the former Mercy High School, a Catholic girls’ school that opened in 1952 and closed in 2020.

CAIS (pronounced “case”) purchased the campus and after two years of renovation, moved in earlier this month.

In addition to having all its students in one place, the school has also added a new strand for incoming middle school students. As its website says, “No Mandarin (Yet?) No problem!”

The Mandarin World Language Pathway allows students to join the school who haven’t studied Chinese. The school’s site says “The Mandarin World Language Pathway program is a much more robust language instruction than students would get in a monolingual school setting.”

This is an attempt to deal with a problem that tends to dog Mandarin immersion programs – it’s impossible to bring in new students after first grade because they can’t catch up to immersion students. This means that class sizes tend to shrink by grades as students move away. Of course, it also means it’s easier to move between Mandarin immersion schools nationally because they’re generally eager to get students in higher grades who have the necessary language background.

The idea of creating a new, middle school path for students without the required language proficiency is one that’s being tried in immersion schools around the country, not just Mandarin but also French and German that I’m aware of.

For example, HudsonWay Immersion School, which has campuses in Manhattan and Stirling, NJ, is now offering an Accelerated Bilingual Cohort in its middle school program.

If you know of schools that have this type of program, please reach out to me and I’ll include them.