Information for parents of kids in Mandarin immersion education
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 hole, here’s a book about The Chinese Typewriter.
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 Spanish, it’s an interesting trend to watch. Utah recently approved a measure that will establish an every-five-year evaluation of the state’s dual-language immersion programs.
By Tim Vandenack, KSL.com | Posted – July 21, 2025 at 6:05 p.m.
BOUNTIFUL — Davis School District officials are evaluating the future of two dual-language immersion programs in district schools because of low participation.
School representatives cited falling participation in the French dual-language program at South Davis Junior High School in Bountiful and limited longevity among participants in the Spanish dual-language program at Lincoln Elementary in Layton. Possible outcomes once the studies are complete, according to school officials, include closure of the programs or consolidation with similar programming in other schools.
Please read more here.
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 Mandarin immersion programs, one in 2006 and one in 2007. With space for no more than 66 incoming Kindergarten students each year.
Imagine my shock and thrill when the San Francisco Unified School District announced Wednesday that an anonymous benefactor was donating the money to create a new, comprehensive K–8 Mandarin Dual Language Immersion school.
Not only that, but Superintendent Dr. Maria Su has gotten the incomparable Liana Szeto, to lead implementation of the program.
Szeto founded Alice Fong Yu K-8, the nation’s first whole-school Cantonese Immersion public school. [Note that San Francisco’s West Portal Elementary school began a strand Cantonese immersion program in 1984.]
Szeto recently retired after 30 years at Alice Fong Yu but will now come back to serve as a Special Advisor to the Superintendent starting in January 2026, the District said in a release.
“Szeto will lead the implementation of a new comprehensive K–8 Mandarin Dual Language Immersion school, as the district moves forward with its plans under her guidance.”
According to the San Francisco Examiner, the district hopes to launch the new school in by the 2027-28 school year.
I cannot express to you how exciting this is, and how amazing. Parents have spent almost two decades clamoring for more Mandarin immersion, five new private MI schools have opened/are planned to open and SFUSD just let all those families – and their lovely funding – slip through its fingers.
Kudos to Dr. Su, who is new to the district and who clearly is willing to lift her eyes up and see what families want and what will keep them in a district that just last year said “SFUSD’s enrollment has decreased by over 4,000 students since school year 2012-13. Demographic trends such as declining birth rates indicate that SFUSD will lose 4,600 additional students by 2032.“
Note that since 2010, 20 new private schools have opened in San Francisco (see the list below.) It’s not demographics, it’s supply and demand.
Thankfully, Dr. Su seems to be finally paying attention to demand, rather than dismissing parents who want something else.
The announcement comes as the school board was set to vote in two weeks on a petition to open a Chinese immersion charter school in San Francisco.
The district in its release says:
“This work is made possible through funding provided by Spark SF Public Schools, thanks to the generosity of a San Francisco Bay Area benefactor who believes deeply in the power of public education and the promise of multilingual learning. Their investment reflects a shared commitment to great public schools in San Francisco, by expanding opportunities for all students and strengthening language programs that leverage the strength of the city’s rich and diverse global populations.”
Let’s hope this isn’t a bait and switch but a real move at the District’s upper levels to meet parents where they are and create programs that draw families to the district.
If I may be so bold, if I were the District I’d also be thinking about French.
About eight years ago a group of Francophone SFUSD parents, including families from Haiti and Africa, tried to convince the district that a French immersion school would be well received and would interest new families as well as being a draw for the District’s African and African American families.
After all, 30% of Africa is French speaking.
But the district turned them down, saying a French immersion program would be elitist. Despite there being at least 14 public French schools in New York City, two in Washington D.C., three in Los Angeles, one in Portland, Oregon and 16 in Utah.
San Francisco already has two private French immersion schools, the French-American International School, Lycée Français de San Francisco as well as the École Notre Dame des Victoire, a K-8 Catholic school that offers daily French instruction. .
At $41,000 a year, I expect there are more than a few parents who would love to go public, have their kids learn French and save a cool $400,000 over the course of a K – 8 education. (And only two SFUSD high schools out of 15 even offer French.)
2025-2026, K – 8
Bilingual English & Chinese
Potrero Hill
2024-2025, 9 – 12
Catholic
Richmond
2024-2025, K – 8
Arts-centered school
Opened new campus in the Presidio, will continue Noe Valley campus
Bertrand D. Hsu American & Chinese Bicultural Academy
2023-2024, K – 8
Mandarin immersion
Location: Potrero Hill
2023, PreK-8 (already established in Marin, this is a SF outpost)
Spanish, Mandarin “infusion”
Location: 3801 Balboa St, the Richmond
2022, PreK – 8 (by 2028)
Montessori, Spanish Immersion
Mission Bay
2019, K – 12
Classical School, teaches Latin, rhetoric.
Location: Bernal Heights
2020, K – 8
Sorts by proficiency, not age, works well for gifted kids.
Dogpatch
2017, K – 8
Montessori, offering both English and a Spanish-immersion program
Mission
2016, 6 – 8
SoMa
2016
6 – 8
The New School of San Francisco (charter)
2015,
K – 12
“Inquiry based”
Mission
2015, 7th – 12th
Math and science focus
Financial District
2014, [Previously existing, plans to double enrollment “to meet increasing demand”]
Potrero Hill
K – 8, “The private school for public school parents.”
2014
Mission district, K – 8
Waldorf-esque
$13,000
2012
SOMA, K – 8
Mandarin immersion
2012, K – 12
Richmond
Science, hands-on focus.
2012
Alamo Square, K – 8
Italian immersion.
2011, K – 8.
Inner Richmond,
Parent cooperative
2010
Portola, K – 8,
Math and Science focus.
Schools that have closed
Academy of Thought and Industry
Closed end of 2023-2024 school year.
San Francisco Girls School
2021, 9-12 CLOSED 2024
Private girls’ high school
Location: The Richmond, 350 9th Ave, San Francisco, CA 94118
Mercy High School
Catholic
1952 – 2020
The Laurel School
Special learning needs
1965 – 2020
Alt School
2013 – 2019, K – 8,
Personalized learning.
for-profit
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 very strongly.
I’m told the new Superintendent of Public Schools says she sees language immersion programs as a way forward for the district. But unclear if that will translate into more support or new programs.
It’s very clear there is a demand. San Francisco has five private Mandarin immersion schools at this point. Parents are willing to pay up to $44,000 a year for these programs.
At the same time. SFUSD is struggling with a budget deficit, which more students would most certainly help with. District officials in the story say they’re supportive of expanding immersion, but that hasn’t always been the experience of families. This would be such an obvious way to bring lots of families into public schools – I wish SFUSD would make it happen. This doesn’t have to be a charter school but there seems little appetite for anything new in the district just now.
By Ko Lyn Cheang, The San Francisco Chronicle – May 24, 2025
Yunita Tjhai has always wanted her kids to be able to speak, read and write Mandarin. Unable to speak Chinese, the San Francisco mother of three, who grew up in Indonesia, regretted that she was never able to communicate with her monolingual Chinese-speaking grandparents.
She and her husband Brian Hollinger enrolled their kids in Mandarin-immersion daycare. The oldest child is now in first grade at one of San Francisco’s only two Mandarin immersion public elementary schools.
Hollinger is concerned that the district has not met the growing demand for Mandarin immersion education and that SFUSD’s turbulent financial situation might jeopardize his kids’ Mandarin education.
Please read more here.
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.
Lafayette school board votes to end Mandarin Chinese immersion at Middlebrook
The Lafayette Parish School Board voted on Wednesday to shutter the Chinese immersion program at Cpl. Michael Middlebrook Elementary School, bringing the language program to an end after 14 years.
The board voted 4-3 to close the program, which will cease operation at the end of this school year. Board members David LeJeune, Britt Latiolais, Hannah Smith Mason and Jeremy Hidalgo voted to close the program. Board members Kate Bailey Labue, who had a family member speak in favor of maintaining the program, and Chad Desormeaux abstained from the vote.
Please read more here.
And on the move to Charter Schools USA, which will begin a Mandarin immersion K – 5 program in August of 2025, please read more here.
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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 in a larger school and Szeto had a vision of a whole school immersion K – 8 environment that would better allow for immersion. She fought for years to convince the school district to create such a school which it only did in 1995, when the Chinese Immersion Public School opened in what had been Columbus School.
It was later renamed Alice Fong Yu after the first Chinese-American teacher to teach at a San Francisco public school, in 1962. Note that the school had formerly been known as the Oriental Public School, part of the segregated school system created in 1859 in San Francisco for Chinese, Japanese and Korean students.
Note that “alternative school” is an old term from the 1970s and early 1980s in SFUSD for schools that offered specialized magnet or other programs.
The first Mandarin immersion school in the country was the private Chinese American International School, founded in 1981 as the Chinese Bilingual School. San Francisco didn’t get a public Mandarin immersion school until 2005 when a program was opened at Starr King Elementary School.
All that said, Principal Szeto is a force to be reckoned with in immersion education and she created a model for a whole-school, public K-8 program that thrives today. Alice Fong Yu remains one of the most requested schools in the district. for the 2025-2026 school year, 141 students applied for 22 Kindergarten spots.
San Francisco Chronicle by Ko Lyn Cheang, June 16, 2025
When Liana Szeto first stepped into the aging brick building in San Francisco that would become the nation’s first Chinese immersion public school, it looked “like a prison.” But the first-time principal had a vision for what the building in the Golden Gate Heights neighborhood could become: a home for the roughly 175 families who’d entrusted her with an unprecedented task.
In the three decades since then, Alice Fong Yu Alternative School has grown to about 600 students. It’s been recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School and California Distinguished School. A playground has been added, along with a wraparound balcony and a middle school, which opened in 2000 and means it now serves K-8 students.
The school is now far from the only Chinese immersion public school in the country or in San Francisco, where 13 other public schools offer Mandarin or Cantonese immersion programs.
Please read more here.
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 programs were. Their “language pledge,” that you speak only the language you’re there to learn, is famed in language-learning circles.
June 21 marks the first student arrival day for the Middlebury Language Schools, known internationally for their full immersion approach to language teaching. This summer the Language Schools will welcome over 1,400 students and 300 faculty and staff to the campuses of Middlebury College, Bennington College, and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS).
Please read more here.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 