Blue Valley School District, located in Kansas in a southern suburb of Kansas City, has voted to entirely shut down its Mandarin immersion program at the end of the year. After that, Mandarin will only be offered in high school.

This is the only Mandarin immersion program in all of Kansas. To find another one, parents would need to move to nearby Kansas City, Missouri to the Foreign Language Academy there.

There are two Kansas Cities. The biggest and oldest in Missouri, with a population of about half a million. Kansas City, Kansas, across the border in Kansas, has a population of 157,000. The next closest Mandarin immersion school is the St. Louis Language Immersion School in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 2023 the district began sunsetting the Mandarin immersion program at Valley Park Elementary, leaving just Wolf Springs Elementary with a program.

At its height, the program served as many as 550 students out of the district’s 22,000.

Parents are fighting to keep the program alive and have a great website outlining what’s happening and why here.

It’s all about the money

The District says the motivation is money. It says it costs $1.2 million a year to fund the Chinese program beyond regular classes. It says it faces a special education funding gap of $18.9 million, due to state-level cuts to special education funding.

Parents say the cost is closer to $763,000.

District superintendent Gillian Chapman said:

“Blue Valley remains a strong school district, but our financial reality is changing. Enrollment continues to decline with the national birthrate at its lowest level, resulting in less state funding. Operating costs continue to rise, and the state continues to fall short of funding 92% of special education excess costs as required by Kansas law. Last year alone, Blue Valley transferred $18.9 million from other district resources to cover the special education funding gap.”

This is something I’ve often wondered about. It shouldn’t, theoretically, cost that much more for Mandarin immersion because Mandarin teachers aren’t paid any more than English teachers.

The parents have an excellent overview of what they think is happening, and why their numbers disagree from the Districts, on their webpage here.

More articles about the closure here