Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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Author: Elizabeth Weise

  • 14-year Louisiana Mandarin immersion program closed. Charter school program opens.

    The Mandarin immersion program at Cpl. Michael Middlebrook Elementary School in Lafayette, Louisiana opened in 2010. It was closed at the end of the 2023-2024 school year due to low enrollment, despite strong opposition from parents. It appears that a local charter school, Lafayette Renaissance Charter Academy, has taken up the Mandarin immersion baton there.…

  • Principal at one of the nation’s oldest public Chinese immersion schools to retire

    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…

  • 110 years of “The Language Pledge” at Middlebury

    Middlebury College’s language summer camps are legendary. I still remember when a guy who was in my Mandarin class at the University of Washington disappeared over the summer and came back talking like he’d been in Beijing, but said he’d been in Vermont – I was very confused. I had no idea how old the…

  • Update on Wyoming’s only Mandarin immersion program

    Cowboy State Daily, Dale Killingbeck January 27, 2025 Casper Elementary School Is Only Public School In State To Offer Mandarin In Dual Language Immersion Paradise Valley Elementary School in Casper is the only public school in Wyoming that offers Mandarin Chinese in a dual-language immersion setting where students spend half the day learning that language…

  • I think Mandarin immersion has arrived – you can now read a romance novel set at an MI school

    A new career. A new school.And a very inconvenient new crush. I’m not sure I could have envisioned, back in 2005 when I first started going to meetings with the San Francisco Unified School District about starting a Mandarin immersion programs here, that twenty years later I’d be reading a romance novel set at a…

  • A look at Seattle’s dual language programs

    Dual Language Programs Empower Students with Bilingualism Seattle Public Schools: January 8, 2025 Seattle Public Schools offers K-12 dual language immersion pathways in Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin Dual Language Programs Empower Students with Bilingualism It’s time for math at McDonald International Elementary, and Miwa Casper is breezing through her lesson with ease. The 5th-grade Japanese immersion…

  • Wow, Anchorage is on fire when it comes to immersion

    There are districts (and indeed whole states) that do K-12 language immersion well. New York City, Portland, Oregon. Minnesota. Utah (which has immersion is on steroids). And then there’s Alaska. I’m not sure how I missed just how remarkable their program is. Anchorage is a city of 286,000 and the Anchorage School District serves approximately…