New charter school won’t open in fall

PLAINSBORO — A group that wants to open a controversial new charter school here with an emphasis on instruction in Mandarin Chinese has run out of time to submit the necessary documents for a September opening, the state Department of Education has decided.

Princeton International Academy Charter School, or PIACS, had until yesterday to obtain a certificate of occupancy and cross other hurdles, but failed to complete the township approval process in time.

PIACS officials immediately blamed public schools for their interference, which included a legal challenge to the charter application and lobbying efforts. The school would have drawn tax dollars and other resources from three public school systems: West Windsor-Plainsboro, Princeton Regional and South Brunswick.

Read more here.

Vancouver school trustees have resurrected a proposal to launch a Mandarin bilingual program for the city’s students.

Proponents hoped the program would be approved for a September startup, but that idea was nixed as the Vancouver School Board struggled to balance its budget that called for more than $17 million in cuts.

In late June, however, COPE trustee Jane Bouey moved a motion, which trustees passed unanimously, to introduce the program one year later—in September 2011.

Bouey believes the program is important even though the district is in tough financial times and laid off staff and cut programs and services.

“It is embarrassing that Edmonton has had such a program for 25 years and Vancouver, where there is a large Mandarin speaking population and thus many opportunities to practise the language, only has a late Mandarin immersion program at Jamieson,” she told the Courier. “It is our board’s hope to expand language programs available in the city. The opportunity to learn other languages is something that should be available to all children.”

The program may be based at John Norquay elementary at 4710 Slocan St, although Bouey said that decision hasn’t been finalized.

Finding books for our kids to read in Chinese is a problem, especially for parents who don’t themselves read Chinese.
To help get more books into our kids’ hands, Mandarin Immersion Parents Council parents with children in 3rd and 4th grade met last week with  Xiangyan Liu, the Course Materials Editor for NanHai bookstore’s Chinese Language Materials department, in Millbrae, Calif.

The kids spent two hours going through over 200 books, telling Ms. Liu which ones they understood, which ones were too baby-ish and which ones were too boring.

The staff at Nanhai did a good job of pulling together what books there were, but the pickings were slim. In the end the Mandarin immersion students did a whole lot of sorting and less finding than we might have liked, but we all knew it was a difficult assignment.

We look forward to working more with Nanhai, and other companies and publishers, to find appropriate Chinese books that our  kids will love to read.

Here are some really wonderful links on Language Immersion Education from the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition:

• Great back issues of their newsletter on immersion
• Bibliographies
• Information for struggling learners
• Two-way immersion

Lots of families are signing their kids up for a new, Mandarin immersion charter school opening in Princeton, N.J., many from non-Mandarin speaking homes. However local residents oppose the school because it’s a charter.

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[From Town Topics, Princeton’s Weekly newspaper}

New Charter School Will Be Challenged At Plainsboro Meeting

Ellen Gilbert

The remaining hurdle for the recently-approved Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS) will be addressed on Wednesday evening, July 7, when the Plainsboro Zoning board will be asked to okay the school’s request for a use variance so that it can occupy the St. Joseph Seminary premises at 75 Mapleton Road.

It is anticipated, however, that opponents of PIACS will use the meeting as an opportunity to express opposition to the school, which plans to offer Mandarin language immersion and an IB (International Baccalaureate) curriculum beginning with grades Kindergarten through two, and expanding a grade each year after.

“I feel sorry for the Plainsboro Zoning Board,” said Princeton Board of Education President Rebecca Cox. “There’s no way that Plainsboro residents have any say about whether or not a charter school can open in their town.” The fact that PIACS is a nonprofit, she added, means that Plainsboro will not be able to collect taxes from them.

While Plainsboro residents haven’t had a say about the presence of PIACS in their community, Ms. Cox indicated that she and others will have plenty to say at the Wednesday meeting about why the new charter school should not be allowed to open, particularly at a time when “money is tight and public school programs are being cut.”

“People don’t understand the math,” said Ms. Cox. “While it appears that they will be taking just three or four children from each elementary school, it adds up to between $60,000 and $70,000 dollars, which is the salary of a classroom teacher.”

A lease agreement with the owners of St. Joseph’s has been finalized, according to PIACS spokesman Parker Block, and all of the documentation necessary for receiving the charter has been submitted to the Department of Education with this one exception. “The property in question was created to house a school and has been used for that purpose by the seminarians for decades until 1995, Mr. Block said. “So in essence we are requesting to use the property for the purpose it was intended.” Ms. Cox countered by noting that PIACS only has a one year lease at St. Joseph’s, which has, she believes, another commitment for the following year. She also expressed concern about the presence of religious symbols at the building.

Parents of children enrolling in PIACS do not, apparently, share these concerns. As of the June 30th deadline, the school had 159 students registered from within the South Brunswick/Princeton/West Windsor region. “The students come from over 30 different schools in the region, so the impact on any one school was indeed mitigated,” noted Mr. Parker. There is currently a waiting list of over 60 out-of-region students interested in attending the school.

“PIACS has filled its kindergarten and the second-grade classes and has started releasing the unfilled first-grade seats to the out-of-region waiting list,” reported Mr. Block. “We will continue accepting applicants for all three waiting lists. In-region applicants will receive priority.”

“Contrary to the predictions of those who opposed the school, the families of the students who have registered are quite diverse,” he noted. “Over 50 percent of the students come from families where no Mandarin is spoken. The community is multi-national, with parents coming from Kenya, Korea, Germany, Mexico, Nigeria, England, Russia, Japan, and France.”

“Total immersion is the way to go,” observed art historian Elizabeth Pilliod, a Princeton resident and parent of an incoming PIACS first grader. “We were in Holland for five months for my husband’s work, and enrolled our son in a school where only Dutch was spoken. Within a month he understood everything. He loved it.”

Read more here.

In response to questions parents had been asking about whether immersion students find that their English is neglected, I asked parents what their experiences had been on the San Francisco Advocates For Multilingual Excellence (which is all immersion programs in the San Francisco Unified School District.)

An incoming Mandarin immersion parent sent the question to a younger relative, Wei-ying Wang, who went through the Cantonese immersion program at West Portal Elementary school in San Francisco.

What came back was a beautiful, insightful essay about Chinese immersion. While her experience is different from Mandarin immersion in that she had first Cantonese and then Mandarin (though I expect it will be of great interest to families at the Chinese Immersion School at DeAvila,) it offers interesting insight into what our kids might experience. And if her off-the-cuff email to a family member is any indication, English fluency is clearly not a problem for kids in immersion.

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By Wei-ying Wang

I don’t feel that my English was neglected in any way whatsoever while going through the immersion programs at West Portal Elementary School and Hoover Middle school. My conversational Chinese was pretty good before starting kindergarten (probably due to going to preschool at the YWCA in Chinatown), probably to the point that my English was not as fluent. I’m not sure how much the programs have changed since I attended, but during my time at West Portal, while I didn’t feel any lack in English.

Looking back years later, I noticed that it was somewhat more difficult to make friends outside of the program, since classes were different and didn’t intermingle much. The only other problem I can think of in elementary school was that the after school daycare program at West Portal didn’t have a staff member who could assist with questions about homework in Chinese. Children with parents who can read/write/speak Chinese definitely had an edge when it came to homework assignments. The program was great because it wasn’t just learning language, but also aspects of Chinese culture.

There was a slight disconnect between transitioning from West Portal to Hoover Middle School. Where math was taught in Chinese and social studies in English at West Portal, the Hoover program reversed this. Hoover’s program was not as immersive as West Portal’s. There was definitely a significant decrease in the time spent speaking Chinese in the classroom (however, this solved West Portal’s problem of socializing with people outside of the program). I thought Hoover’s program was equally valuable, although I will say learning about US history in Chinese was quite difficult. I’m not sure if it was my imagination or not, since it was so long ago, but it felt like I was in class longer than other students (since we had an early morning class). The classes were good though, and I remember we even had weekly assignments that required us to read and summarize articles in Chinese newspapers.

Lowell High School’s Chinese program is completely different, primarily because it was Mandarin instead of Cantonese, and because it was only a language class (versus a couple of subjects that were taught in Chinese). So there definitely no problem with neglected English in this case since Chinese was only 40 minutes a day. This was also where I had my first introduction to simplified Chinese characters. The difficulty here wasn’t picking up Mandarin, or even learning the simplified writing, but that my Chinese reading comprehension was much more advanced than that of my classmates. This made things awkward, since I could clearly understand the things I was reading, but couldn’t read them aloud very accurately.

This led to the reading material being somewhat elementary for me. I would say that the majority of the students in the Chinese classes at Lowell knew conversational Chinese, but had had no previous experience with reading and writing in Chinese. The style of teaching and curriculum of the classes were also very different from the immersion programs in that these classes fulfilled a language requirement, and were therefore very focused on teaching a very straightforward and not necessarily interesting material (which made the pace of the class seem a little slow despite how frequently we were meeting). The funny thing was that they actually had a section of the class devoted to food, so students were taught things like how to say “honey walnut shrimp.” Which didn’t seem too useful for ordering in many SF restaurants where Cantonese is the standard.

I would note that high schools and most colleges and universities only offer Mandarin classes. However, I think students who went through the West Portal, Hoover and Alice Fong Yu (a K-8 Cantonese immersion public school) immersion programs are at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to this, if they opt to continue taking Mandarin past middle school. The problem which I faced (not so much in high school but once I hit college) is that I had extremely advanced reading comprehension and extremely poor verbal fluency in Mandarin.

Particularly in college, where the reverse was usually true for the students taking Chinese (they could speak, but couldn’t read or write). This put me in an extremely awkward position when I started at Wellesley College’s Chinese department. In the first week of classes, I tried out 3 different levels of courses because the professors didn’t know what to do with me. The first class was introductory 100-level class, and completely boring since it was so easy. The second class was a slightly more advanced beginner’s class, where once again the course materials were too easy, but I couldn’t understand the instructor’s Mandarin (the department head thought it might have to do with my ability to understand the instructor’s accent). Finally, they settled me in an advanced conversational Mandarin class (which was a 300-level class). Again, I would say the course materials and assignments weren’t particularly difficult, but I had great difficulty with the speaking portion of the class.

I think that Chinese immersion programs are extremely valuable from an educational standpoint. For children of native speakers, the programs provide a connection to their heritage and culture, which would otherwise be greatly reduced going through the traditional track. If the children already speak the language, the programs offer a space to improve and maintain their fluency (which they would definitely lose spending the entire school day speaking in English). I think the programs are designed with the understanding that they shouldn’t impact English comprehension detrimentally.

I don’t think I missed anything from learning multiplication and division or the Articles of the Confederation in Chinese instead of English. If anything, I probably learned more, since I could talk about the things I learned at school in both Chinese and English. The immersion program makes speaking Chinese in class the norm, it doesn’t seem strange or foreign when everyone around you is experiencing the same thing.

I would also add that going through an immersion program didn’t make it seem like I was doing a lot more work than regular students, even though, to some degree, I was. This is probably the advantage of an immersion program over after school Chinese classes (which I’ve heard from many people aren’t too useful since you end up resenting having to go to another class after everyone else gets off from school).

All in all, even though I don’t think my Chinese is as good as it was several years ago due to lack of usage, I still value the experience and the education I received from these programs and support the continuation and expansion of bilingual immersion programs.

As for how useful it is in everyday life, I didn’t keep in touch with many people from the immersion programs, so I’m not entirely sure if they used the Chinese they learned later on in life. The only person I’ve seen recently gave a eulogy in Chinese for her late grandfather, and she noted that going through the immersion program allowed her to be the only one in the family able to communicate with her grandfather in his native language.

As for myself, I haven’t used my Chinese much beyond listening to pop music 🙂 When I was living in Boston though, I had many elderly Chinese people asking me for directions on the trains, so I’m sure they appreciated my Cantonese. If I had continued on the career path I had originally intended in college (art historian in contemporary Chinese art), I think I would have used the Mandarin a lot. I did notice that of the students taking Mandarin in College, quite a few of them did so with the intention of using it in their future finance careers.

Some Uniform thoughts For Starr King & Jose Ortega Elementary Schools

(These tips apply to pretty much any school with uniforms in San Francisco, sometimes the bottoms are navy blue, sometimes black, sometimes khaki.)

Uniform requirements:

Starr King’s uniform is navy blue bottoms and a white, collared shirt on top.

Jose Ortega’s uniform is the same, though light-blue and navy shirts are also allowed.

Any colored shoes, socks and tights are fine.

Land’s End Preferred School Program:

If you buy your uniforms at Land’s End, each school is part of their Preferred School program and the school gets some money back from purchases. Each schools’ number is below.

Starr King: 900138058.

Jose Ortega : 900139296.

Suggestions from current parents:

Where do you get uniforms?

–        I ordered a bunch of stuff from http://www.thechildrenswearoutlet.com/shop/ last year. The shirts were fine. I wish I had bought more of them. The bottoms were really variable in sizes-we bought a skirt that though it said it was a 6, seemed more like an 8.

–        Thrift Town (2101 Mission Street) for pants, shorts, jackets, and sweaters. They tend not to have white polo shirts, which I bought new.

–        I also bought some jumpers/skirts at thrift stores (which were fine). Most thrift stores have a small stock of random uniform stuff all year, but I found that at the end of the summer Thrift Town had a big rack of things. I had a harder time finding good white shirts or pants there and after a year I see why.

–        Ross/Marshalls also had a good selection of various brands in the fall. This might be a good inexpensive choice for non-standard sizes.

–        Now Gap/Crazy8s/all department stores have uniforms in the late summer/fall.  Sears ran a promotion that said that if they didn’t have the size you wanted it would be free last fall

–        Burlington Coat Factory, They have white polo style shirts available for boys and girls throughout the school year. Girls size 7 pants have been elusive at the Howard/5th Street store

What brands are good/bad?

–        I would say Lands End, Polo. I got 6 or so shirts from Amazon; French Toast was the brand (cheap! like $7 each). They are mediocre quality, tho’ my son likes them.

–        Kindergarteners need elastic waistbands so that it’s easier for them to handle the bathroom on their own!  I liked the cargo pants from Children’s Place for this reason, but they seem to wear out just before the year ends.

–        We like the polyester jumpers and skirts from French Toast (frenchtoast.com). They don’t get all gnarly, curly and faded in the wash like cotton ones. Cute styles, too.

–        Though the French Toast white polo shirts don’t hold up as well as Lands End.

–        Gymboree (my fave); French toast on line (runs small); Target; Kohls(my 2nd fave)

–        Lands End endures!  Can last the whole year

Is there a good place to buy for different sized-kids (some uniform pants are too big if you’ve got a really thin kid, for example)

–        Some of the Target skorts have adjustable waist bands which is helpful for my slim girl.

–        Some Lands End clothes have adjustable waist bands

What will the kid really wear (i.e. skirts? jumpers? Sweaters? hoodies?)

– I suggest layering a white or blue knit shirt under a polo or dress on cooler days. I’ve bought a lot of cute navy-blue sweaters from Lands’ End over the years, and the most recent one was lost on the second day of school. It disappeared when my daughter left it on the bench during recess. Knit shirts are cheaper to replace.

– Littler girls seem to like skirts and jumpers, later on they only seem to want to wear pants. For under skirts and jumper, bicycle shorts are a great way to avoid the dreaded “I see London, I see France…” problem.

– All the kinder girls seem to wear short skirts or short dresses with blue (or other color) leggings underneath (or colorful tights). My son refused to wear any long-sleeved white shirt. (button-down, turtleneck, polo-style — nada.) He wears hoodie sweaters and jackets.

– My son wore shorts for a few days, but EVERY time he wore shorts, he came home with skinned (bloody) knees. I don’t know whether it was just unlucky, or my son is particularly clumsy, but be aware that very active kids + shorts = scabby knees. My son is OK wearing pants, so we just went w/that.

– Skorts and jumpers.  Mine won’t wear pants.  In K she loved the blue dresses w/ short sleeves (no white shirt needed) from Target. I bought a couple for first grade and she didn’t wear them all year.  Hoodies are a must but needn’t be uniform colors.  I got a white hoodie and a navy sweater before learning that hoodies are free choice and my girl rarely wore those.  She chose her pink or pink- hearts hoodies instead.

– A few months into the school year my daughter decided that she really didn’t want to wear skirts or dresses anymore-so I would advise if you have a girl being cautious about your selection.

– What my daughter wants to wear are navy yoga pants from target and long sleeve, non-ruffle collared shirts.  Every day.  Regardless if you have a kinder  kid I would advise making sure that kids are able to get the pants on and off without assistance. I didn’t think of this and we had an accident before she was able to get her pants off.

What do you wish you’d bought more of?

–        White short-sleeved shirts

–        Pink tights and leggings

–        More shirts set aside and reserved for after Christmas would have been a good idea. The shirts she’s wearing now are funky-dunky, but I am not buying more until the fall.

–        White collared tops, navy blue bottoms.

I try and buy thicker pants for my active son, as we have problems getting holes in the knees. I look year round for stuff on sale and grab it when it is the next size up! I also recommend buying the long sleeved polos when they come out late July/ e…

–        White collared tops, navy blue bottoms.

–        I try and buy thicker pants for my active son, as we have problems getting holes in the knees. I look year round for stuff on sale and grab it when it is the next size up! I also recommend buying the long sleeved polos when they come out late July/ early August, as they are hard to find when it gets cold (unless you buy online).

–        For our daughter it is all about variety as you never know if she’ll want to wear skirts/ dresses 5 days a week.

–        A good, sturdy cotton zip up sweater (Lands End makes a nice one) is great for girls. Navy blue held up better than white. My girls worn theirs to school almost every day.

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What do you wish you’d skipped?

–        Long-sleeved white shirts, and maybe some of the shorts (due to the skinned-knee thing)

–        This year, dresses

–        Fancy long-sleeved shirts that buttoned for girls, which they consistently refused to wear, however cute they looked to me.

–        We tried shorts the first year but they never got worn.

–        Uniform pants can be heavy and stiff sometimes. We really liked the yoga flare pants that Lands End sells. There are also similar knit pants at Target and sometimes you find them at Costco, though it’s hit or miss there.

When did you buy?

–        June – August (you gotta give it more time at a thrift store)

–        In August.  We went together and it was a fun getting- ready- for- school shopping trip.

–        Tip if you like the Lands End yoga flare pants, which are very popular – they tend to run out by Nov, so buy enough because otherwise you’ll get the dreaded “out of stock until July” message

–        Shortly before year started, the kids grow like weeds between ages 5-7.

How long do they last?

–        The new shirts got stained right away. The thrift store pants are still fine. Nothing is torn or too small, so define “last”…. 🙂 However, when he entered K, he had some 4T garments — those he outgrew by Feb/Mar (he turned 5 in Aug, so I figured I got an extra 6 months out of them).

–        How long do they last?  My da is still wearing some of the k skorts at the end of 1st grade. they’re not as crisp but are fine.

–        Boys will destroy white shirts. You just have to live with it. Stain sticks are your friend.

–

How many of everything do you need?

–        We got too much. I got seven or eight skorts/jumpers and some pants that she never ever wore, and probably even more shirts, in K.  She outgrew some of the shirts midyear. I bought the larger size at the beginning of the year (on the advice of a 2nd grade parent) and those she still wears a year later.

–        In K my daughter was into tights. In 1st she’s more into leggings.  If your kid wears pants you can skip this step.

How many of everything do you need?

– pants: 6-8 prs

shorts: 1-2

short-sleeved shirts: 6-8

long-sleeved shirts: 1-2

sweaters/hoodies: 3-4

jackets: 3-4

–        5 outfits so that I don’t have to do laundry mid week.

–        At least five white, short-sleeved polo shirts as at a certain point they seem to stop wearing anything else, and they usually get them so dirty in one day that you can’t get by with having them wear them twice.

Do kids outgrow stuff in Kindergarten? Will I need to shop twice?

–        Only the 4t stuff.

–        A 2nd grade parent advised me to get larger sizes in august/sept bec they need them in jan/feb and uniforms are much much harder to find then.

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What about shoes?

– I see a lot of Kinders wearing crocs or sandals (boys and girls). My guy is not that guy. Early in the year he wore construction boots, slip on hiking-style (low) shoes, and now he wears basketball shoes (hi-tops). He is athletic and wants to RUN and play on the yard. Some of the girls, though, especially, wear cute girly shoes. Depends on temprament, I think.

– before Kindergarten I got one pair of cute Mary Jane shoes to go with the uniforms (not required, any kind of shoes, hoodies, socks is fine) and my daughter wore them once.  Her feet grew a lot over the last couple of years so we’ve gone through quite  few tennis shoes.

– Something they can run around in well on the playground.

Other tips:

–        When it’s cold, the kids can wear any colored long sleeved shirt as long as a white shirt is worn on top. (Laundry is easier when the long sleeves are dark colored!)

–        Ditto that – they’re much more likely to lose a sweater than a long-sleeved shirt that they won’t take off.

–        Cotton sweaters they can wear inside in the winter months when it’s cold.