Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education

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  • Wisconsin Mandarin immersion school ranked 7th in state

    From: The Verona Press The Verona Area International School (VAIS) was recently named #7 in Wisconsin Elementary Schools and #2 in Wisconsin Charter Elementary Schools for 2025 by U.S. News & World Report.  VAIS is a public, tuition-free charter school founded in 2010 as a Chinese immersion school. Located at 400 N. Main St. in…

  • A lovely story about a Chinese typerwriter

    For your summer reading pleasure, here’s a great and fascinating story about a long-lost Chinese typewriter that was discovered through Facebook. Several outlets picked it up: The New York Time, NPR and a nice video. You can also read about it in the Stanford Report. And should you want to really go down a rabbit…

  • Some immersion programs in Utah losing students

    Utah is a leader in language immersion schools. This year the state boasted 344 elementary, middle or high schools offered dual language programming, which includes 172 in Spanish and 99 in Chinese. Other languages offered include French, Portuguese, German and Russian. While the schools referenced in the article below are losing students in French and…

  • Wow. San Francisco’s getting a new, PUBLIC Mandarin immersion K – 8 program!

    San Francisco’s Mandarin immersion landscape has increasingly one of a new private school opening every few years, as I wrote a few weeks ago. There are currently four, with one more coming. Parents pay up to $44,000 a year for these programs: During that time, the San Francisco Unified School District has opened exactly two…

  • San Francisco parents trying to start a K-8 Mandarin immersion charter – good luck with that

    I don’t envy these parents trying to do this in notoriously anti-charter San Francisco. Their point is a good one – there are long waiting lists for the city’s two public Mandarin immersion elementary schools (Starr King and Jose Ortega) but the school district won’t open more. SFUSD also doesn’t support the middle school program…

  • 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…