Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

The dates in this story are a little hard to follow. The first Cantonese immersion program in the San Francisco Unified School District was a West Portal Elementary school, in 1984. That program continues to this day.

Principal Szeto was hired to work at West Portal in 1986. But the program was just a strand in a larger school and Szeto had a vision of a whole school immersion K – 8 environment that would better allow for immersion. She fought for years to convince the school district to create such a school which it only did in 1995, when the Chinese Immersion Public School opened in what had been Columbus School.

It was later renamed Alice Fong Yu after the first Chinese-American teacher to teach at a San Francisco public school, in 1962. Note that the school had formerly been known as the Oriental Public School, part of the segregated school system created in 1859 in San Francisco for Chinese, Japanese and Korean students.

Note that “alternative school” is an old term from the 1970s and early 1980s in SFUSD for schools that offered specialized magnet or other programs.

The first Mandarin immersion school in the country was the private Chinese American International School, founded in 1981 as the Chinese Bilingual School. San Francisco didn’t get a public Mandarin immersion school until 2005 when a program was opened at Starr King Elementary School.

All that said, Principal Szeto is a force to be reckoned with in immersion education and she created a model for a whole-school, public K-8 program that thrives today. Alice Fong Yu remains one of the most requested schools in the district. for the 2025-2026 school year, 141 students applied for 22 Kindergarten spots.

San Francisco Chronicle by Ko Lyn Cheang, June 16, 2025

When Liana Szeto first stepped into the aging brick building in San Francisco that would become the nation’s first Chinese immersion public school, it looked “like a prison.” But the first-time principal had a vision for what the building in the Golden Gate Heights neighborhood could become: a home for the roughly 175 families who’d entrusted her with an unprecedented task.

In the three decades since then, Alice Fong Yu Alternative School has grown to about 600 students. It’s been recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School and California Distinguished School. A playground has been added, along with a wraparound balcony and a middle school, which opened in 2000 and means it now serves K-8 students. 

The school is now far from the only Chinese immersion public school in the country or in San Francisco, where 13 other public schools offer Mandarin or Cantonese immersion programs.

Please read more here.