Located in a suburb of Kansas City, the Blue Valley Schools’ inaugural language immersion program began in the 2017-18 school year at Wolf Springs Elementary. A second Chinese Immersion site, Valley Park Elementary, welcomed its inaugural class during the 2018-19 school year. The district has said there was strong community interest in Chinese, it’s a critical language and offers students a global focus.

Blue Valley parents concerned for Chinese immersion program
by: Kevin Barry

From Fox 4

Feb. 1, 2023

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Parents in the Blue Valley School District Chinese immersion program are looking for answers after hearing the program their students are in is getting evaluated.

On January 19, the district sent families a letter saying that the Chinese immersion program would be evaluated based on:

• Ability to provide Mandarin instruction in a sustainable way
• Ability to attract, retain and support high-quality Chinese Immersion program teachers, both Chinese and English-speaking teachers within the program
• Ability to sustain a pathway for current immersion students to achieve success on the AP Chinese Language test in high school

Please see more here.

A nice essay about one northern California family’s first five years in Mandarin immersion. Thanks to Devra for allowing me to repost her essay.

• DEVRA NELSON
• FEB 8, 2022
• The We Have Kids blog

When we enrolled our daughter in a Mandarin immersion charter school five years ago, no one in our family could speak a word of Chinese. We have no family connections or ancestral roots in China; and in fact, we’d never even been to China, or anywhere else in Asia, for that matter.

You might wonder, then, why we chose to send our daughter to a Mandarin immersion school—and what our experience has been like, now that we’re five years in.

Why Mandarin Immersion?

Our family’s reasons for choosing Mandarin immersion aren’t particularly unique. There are more than one billion Mandarin speakers in the world today. China is one of the world’s largest economies, and it’s reasonable to think that Mandarin speakers might have an advantage in the workplace. In addition, China is increasingly influential in terms of global politics and environmental impacts, and a deep cultural knowledge seems important in terms of building connections and finding solutions.

Please read more here.

新年快乐! 春节快乐!

Happy year of the Rabbit. Lunar New Year is a time to visit family, eat special foods, make dumplings, hand out red envelopes or see a special program at your Mandarin immersion school.

Here in San Francisco, where 33% of students are Asian, it’s also an official school holiday

The glory of Chinese New Year (also known as the Spring Festival) is that it lasts for another eight days, so you’re not behind at all. Lots more days to have some delicious food while you visit with family and friends.

You can read about the traditions and activities that come with the Spring Festival here.

2023 is the year of the Water Rabbit. People born in this year are said to be sensitive, intuitive and thoughtful.

For most of China, New Year wouldn’t be New Year without watching the star-studded New Year Variety Special that aired Saturday night. It’s the special’s 40th year and the four-hour gala is the most-watched television show in the world.

It’s available on YouTube here, broken into several sections.

Happy New Year to you all.

Out of 356 California Distinguished Schools announced this month by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, nine were either Mandarin or Cantonese immersion.

They include:

Alameda

Yu Ming Charter, K – 8

Alameda County Office of Education

El Dorado Hills

Buckeye Union Mandarin Immersion Charter, K – 8

Buckeye Union School District

Palo Alto

Ohlone Elementary

Palo Alto Unified School District

Redwood City

Orion Alternative School

Redwood Shores School District

San Bernardino

Hidden Trails Elementary

Chino Valley Unified

San Francisco, California

Chin (John Yehall) Elementary (Cantonese bilingual)

Chinese Immersion School at DeAvila (Cantonese immersion)

San Francisco Unified School District

San Jose

John Muir Elementary School (Cupertino Language Immersion Program)

Cupertino Union School District. (CLIP is the oldest public Mandarin Immersion program in California and the second oldest in the country.)

San Mateo

College Park Elementary

San Mateo-Foster City School District

Note that the Red Clay Consolidated School District has had a Mandarin immersion program for several years, but has chosen to phase it out due to low enrollment, according to the District. It appears enough parents want to continue to have Mandarin immersion available in the district that they’re trying to get a charter school opened now. The charter would be called New Castle Language School. The school the program had been in is about 20% Asian-American, compared with 4.3% for students in Deleware schools as a whole.

Some links about the closure:

https://www.change.org/p/red-clay-school-district-do-not-cancel-mandarin-immersion

https://sites.google.com/redclayschools.com/mandarin/home?pli=1

Public calls for Red Clay Mandarin immersion charter

Public Square Live, JAREK RUTZ, Aug. 18, 2022

Several members of the public called Wednesday night for the Red Clay Consolidated School District to help create a Mandarin immersion charter school in New Castle County.

During Red Clay’s monthly board meeting, proponents said students would spend about half the day in English-speaking classrooms and the other half in classrooms where the instructor exclusively uses Mandarin.

Kelli Carrubba, a mother of two students in Red Clay, brought the topic up, saying that there are many students in the district that would benefit from the Mandarin immersion charter. 

According to her, parents have already organized a non-profit and a board for the “New Castle Language School,” and a Facebook page of 118 members who are in support of the new building. 

The page was created on March 19, 2021 with the mission of “developing globally-minded citizens who have the knowledge and skills to affect positive change in our world.”

Please read more here.

This is a post from MassINC, a Massachusetts non-profit made up of civic and business leaders seeking to provide “accurate, thorough, and unbiased data to inform policymaking.” Their goal is to produce public policy research focused on building ladders to the middle class for all Massachusetts residents

They define “gateway cities” as “Gateway Cities as “midsize urban centers that anchor regional economies around the state. For generations, these communities were home to industry that offered residents good jobs and a “gateway” to the American Dream. Over the past several decades, manufacturing jobs slowly disappeared. Lacking resources and capacity to rebuild and reposition, Gateway Cities have been slow to draw new economic investment.”

Gateway Cities look to the corner office for leadership on school integration

The Gateway Cities Journal

Dec 19, 2022 

On the campaign trail, Governor-elect Healey did not articulate clear strategies for closing stark educational disparities in Massachusetts. Her appointments and statements in the coming weeks will be closely watched for clues on how she will approach these challenging issues. A strong first step would be to depart from her predecessors by acknowledging that increasing school segregation is a threat to the commonwealth’s social and economic future, and a problem that she will take head-on from the corner office.

MassINC began 2022 with a report that looked at the increasing concentration of low-income students in Gateway City schools. This longstanding trend has major ramifications for development patterns in Massachusetts and widening inequality. Fortunately, there are meaningful responses that don’t require radical change. Dual-language immersion (DLI) is one of the most promising.

Please read more here.

And some reports they link to:

The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms

Dual-Language Immersion Programs Raise Student Achievement in English

Anchorage School Board says immersion programs will not be cut to save money

By Lex Yelverton, Anchorage Daily News

Published: Nov. 16, 2022

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – In a major update on the budget cuts that the Anchorage School District is considering, the Anchorage School Board announced that the district’s language immersion programs will not be axed.

At Tuesday night’s school board meeting, the support was overwhelming in favor of saving the immersion programs. More than 100 people signed up for public testimony, with a majority of them trying to save the language programs.

However, before they could speak, the president of the school board made an announcement.

“After our work session today, we have decided to take immersion off the list for this year,” ASD School Board President Margo Bellamy said.

Please read more here.

==

A letter from a parent prior to the announcement:

Letters to the Editor to the Anchorage Daily News

Letter: Support immersion students

By Danielle Igtanloc and Cody Morris

Published: November 17, 2022

We are parents of a student who is enrolled in the Scenic Park Elementary Chinese Immersion program. We are highly disappointed to hear that immersion programs are being considered for discontinuation due to budget cuts. Our daughter has several friends in different immersion programs within the Anchorage School District who share her joy and enthusiasm for being an immersion student. Removal of these programs impacts our daughter, her peers, the families of the students, and the community.

As parents, we are concerned about the ethical and moral lessons removing immersion would teach our daughter and students in similar positions. By choosing to cut immersion programs based on budget, we would be teaching these students that their commitment does not matter. The quality time invested in going beyond the minimum education requirement does not matter. More importantly, we would teach them that cultural diversity and knowledge do not matter.

Please read more here.

More about the program here, from the Asia Society