In Blue Valley, here’s another Chinese-immersion school for your child

When the Blue Valley School District opted to pilot a Chinese language immersion program at Wolf Springs Elementary this year, administrators held off on deciding whether the district would expand the opportunity to more students.

“We identified with the Board of Education that we would only tackle one year at a time,” said Tonya Merrigan, the district’s chief of curriculum. “We had to study and make sure that it would be successful at Wolf Springs.”

The question of whether it could find enough teachers up for the challenge of teaching young English-speakers subjects such math and science almost exclusively in Mandarin was also something to consider.

Since the immersion program aims to create bilingual students by instructing kids in a second language from kindergarten through high school, the district would need to hire at least one additional Mandarin-speaking teacher per year as more children entered the program.

But after this fall, when several qualified Mandarin-speaking teachers applied to teach the inaugural class when it moves to first grade next year and preliminary data indicated that Wolf Spring’s current immersion students are making academic progress while learning Mandarin, the district has announced it will expand the program to another school.

The Blue Valley School Board approved the expansion this week of the district’s fledgling program to Valley Park Elementary School.

Next year, a new class of Valley Park kindergarteners will begin their formal years of schooling learning math, science and social studies in Mandarin and studying reading and literacy in English, as more than 40 Wolf Springs kindergarteners do this year.

The addition means that three classes of immersion students will operate in the district next year, a kindergartener and first grade program at Wolf Springs and the new kindergarten program at Valley Park.

Valley Park had the space to accommodate the growing program, Merrigan said. And it’s location across the street from Blue Valley North High School, where students already interact with students at a sister school in Taiwan, made it a natural fit.

The Confucius Institute, a community-based Chinese language organization based on the University of Kansas’ Edwards Campus, also helped Blue Valley find qualified applicants not just for its program, but for its global language classes.

The district has also opted to add Mandarin as a elective course at several schools. Next year, middle school and high school students can choose to study Mandarin at Overland Trail Middle, Aubry Bend Middle, Blue Valley North and Blue Valley Southwest schools.

The 2018-19 immersion kindergarten classes at both Wolf Springs and Valley Park — the district can accommodate roughly 50 immersion students at each school — will be determined by a lottery. Interested parents can apply on the school district’s website starting next year.

This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 10:13 AM with the headline "In Blue Valley, here’s another Chinese-immersion school for your child."