Or those that have new teachers. This is the sort of thing parents might have to fundraise for, but it makes a huge difference in how well your program will work.

http://www.carla.umn.edu/institutes/2015/imm_chnjpn.html

Immersion 101 for Chinese and Japanese

An Introduction to Immersion Teaching

June 22–26, 2015 (Teacher Session) June 22–23, 2015 (2-day Admin Session)

Target Audience: Pre-service and novice K–12 Chinese and Japanese immersion teachers, administrators, district personnel or policy makers, and specialist teachers in immersion schools. It is not meant for experienced immersion teachers.

New Chinese or Japanese immersion teachers and administrators will receive a research-based introduction to the challenges, options, and issues in the unique world of immersion education (K–12). Targeted institute participants include one-way (world language) and two-way immersion educators who teach subject matter through Chinese or Japanese for 50–100% of the school day and promote continued development of English (amount of instructional time in English varies by grade level).

On the first two days, the focus will be on issues of interest to new immersion teachers and administrators. Administrators and district personnel will have an opportunity to engage with key issues in immersion program design and implementation for character-based languages, and discuss strategies for meeting those challenges with an experienced immersion administrator. During the following three days, novice teacher participants will be introduced to effective practices that inform language and literacy-attentive curriculum development and instruction with non-cognate, character-based languages whose writing system differs from English.

Mandarin Chinese immersion classes to debut in Cabarrus district

Language program will start next year at Cox Mill Elementary
By Lisa Thornton
Correspondent
Posted: Friday, Feb. 20, 2015
Rising kindergartners in Cabarrus County Schools will have the option next year to learn the majority of their lessons in Mandarin Chinese instead of English.

The new SPLASH Mandarin Chinese Immersion Program will be the first of its kind in the county where students will spend 90 percent of their instructional day studying core subjects like math and science in Chinese.

“It’s the best way to learn a language,” said Alison Moore, principal at Cox Mill Elementary School, where the new immersion program will be housed.

Next year, Cox Mill, one of the largest elementary schools in the system, will offer two of its eight kindergarten classes in Chinese.

Priority for the 48 available seats will go to Cox Mills families. The remaining slots will go into a lottery for other rising kindergartners within the county who can provide their own transportation.

Read more here.

Currently students just go through 5th grade and then have to wait until high school to take Mandarin again, when they enter into the same non-immerson system used for students not coming from immersion. Not ideal.

Palo Alto school board backs Mandarin immersion program expansion

Jordan Middle School could host new pilot program

by Elena Kadvany / Palo Alto Weekly

FEBRUARY 10, 2015

The Home2 Suites in Dover, Delaware isn’t exactly the Ritz, but it made a strong impression on David Schultz.

“I mean, teachers, We’re not used to this.” Schultz says, eyebrow arched.

“This” refers to five nights spent at a hotel chain that Wikipedia calls “mid-tier.” It also refers to a level of special treatment rarely afford to teachers—much less aspiring ones.

Schultz and three of his colleagues spent a week recently in Central Delaware as guests of the Delaware Department of Education. They’re all fluent in Mandarin Chinese. They’re all studying to be teachers at the University of Maryland. And they’re all willing to teach elementary school students, or at least consider it.

That rare combination makes them valuable—enough so that Delaware asked them up for a recruiting visit more than a year before they’ll be ready to teach.

“We want them to feel like this is the place they want to be,” says Gregory Fulkerson, who oversees world languages and international education at the Delaware Department of Education. “They want to be in Delaware. They want to live here. They want to work in our schools. They want to make sure our students are the best in the world.”

Please read more here.

One of the reasons this was rejected was because the school’s proposed charterl said that after 2nd grade it would only admit students who were proficient in Mandarin.

Claire Cunningham, a legal counsel to the Office of Education, found fault with the proposed charter’s language proficiency requirement for children who want to enroll after second grade. “All public schools, including charter schools … have to admit all students who seek to attend. And [if] a public school wishes to exclude portions of students who may wish to attend, that’s not permissible under the [California] education code,” she said.

That’s odd, as every Mandarin immersion (and Spanish immersion and French immersion) program I’m aware of doesn’t allow students who aren’t proficient in both languages after a certain point, usually first grade. There’s simply no other way you can run an immersion school. In fact College Park Elementary, in the San Mateo/Foster City School District, just 14 miles away in, is example of such a school.

It’s also the rule at all the public immersion schools in San Francisco Unified School District.

It’s a puzzler, to be sure…

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