Lessons in Mandarin Chinese-language immersion school nears reality in Eugene.

Byline: Anne Williams The Register-Guard

With promising results from a feasibility study and a federal government eager to invest in Chinese-language education, it's looking more likely that the Eugene School District will launch a Mandarin Chinese elementary immersion program, possibly in fall 2008.

The program, which probably would start with kindergarten and grow with its inaugural class, would become the district's fourth language immersion school, opening 20 years after the most recent one, Yujin Gakuen, the Japanese immersion elementary.

While no specific locations are up for discussion yet, community supporters and district officials alike strongly favor the Churchill High School region, the only region with no immersion school.

"I think it's going to happen," said Superintendent George Russell, whose staff recently reported to the school board on the planning effort. "The question is when."

For children such as 6-year-old Claire Lin, one of 25 youngsters enrolled in a two-week University of Oregon-sponsored Chinese-language camp that runs through Friday at Bertha Holt Elementary, it probably won't happen soon enough.

Her mother, Pamela Kwan, said that's OK - Claire will start her second year at Yujin Gakuen in the fall, and Japanese, like Chinese, is an important language to her and her husband, who is half Japanese and half Taiwanese.

But if a Chinese program opens in 2008, there's a good chance Claire's younger sister, Kelly, will be among the first to sign up. Kwan recognizes the academic and career-related advantages of being bilingual, but also sees less tangible benefits.

"It's helped me in my life," said Kwan, who spoke Cantonese, her parents' native language, at home as a little girl and still has limited mastery. "It's difficult to articulate, but language provides a link to a culture ... It kind of makes you more receptive when you're an adult to different perspectives and different people and understanding different points of view."

Momentum for a Chinese program began in winter 2005, when a community group coalesced in the wake of publicity about a federal grant given to the UO to work with Portland Public Schools to develop a kindergarten-through-college Chinese immersion program. In such programs, students are taught in a foreign language for at least half the instructional day.

That group - whose members included parents as well as representatives from the UO's Center for Applied Second Language Studies, Language Learning Solutions, the private Eugene Chinese School, the Asian Council, the Chinese-American Benevolent Association and Holt International Children's Services, which coordinates many Chinese adoptions - submitted a proposal the following spring, urging the district to launch a program in 2007.

While district officials said that timeline was too short, they agreed to earmark about one-tenth of a three-year, $553,000 Foreign Language Assistance Program grant to research and design such a program. About $15,000 went to the UO's CASLS, which is designing a Chinese elementary assessment and completed a feasibility study last spring.

CASLS Director Carl Falsgraf and his staff tried to answer several questions, including whether there's sufficient parental interest; what effect the program would have on neighborhood schools; what the financial impact would be; and whether the school could find qualified teachers.

Among the findings:

Seventy-four parents of children age 5 or younger are on record as interested in enrolling their children in the school. Falsgraf's team found many of them at the Asian Celebration in February, where they set up an information table about the program. CASLS researchers found others - and vice versa - through word-of-mouth or other means.

Of those, 22 percent are of Chinese heritage, which shows there's broad support within Eugene's Chinese-American community, Falsgraf said. Another 23 percent have adopted children from China.

The Bush administration has deemed Mandarin Chinese a critical language given China's rising global prominence. Since 2000, the U.S. Department of Education has doled out nearly $100 million in Foreign Language Assistance Program grants such as the one the district received last fall, and millions more are available through the Department of Defense, which wants to boost the number of Americans with professional levels of competency in Chinese and other languages critical to national security.

Eugene's program would be highly competitive, Falsgraf said, and CASLS would be willing to assist the district in securing those funds, which potentially could minimize or eliminate start-up costs.

Portland Public Schools have been able to attract enough certified, highly qualified teachers to their 10-year-old, 200-student Chinese immersion program at Woodstock Elementary, and Falsgraf said the Eugene district should be able to do the same with potential federal grants and assistance from CASLS, which taps into a national network of Chinese language teachers and experts.

CASLS found that 32 percent of interested parents live outside district boundaries but said they would consider moving into the district or paying tuition for their to give their children the opportunity to be in the program. Another 13 percent said they were considering only private schools, but probably would opt for public schools if Chinese immersion were available. Another 11 percent said they were considering only district alternative schools, such as Eastside or Buena Vista, the Spanish immersion school.

Based on that data, Falsgraf said, the Chinese program would probably have minimal effect on neighborhood schools, as just 44 percent of prospective students would be likely otherwise to attend them.

Falsgraf said he hopes those findings will reassure district officials and some neighborhood school advocates, who worry that the program will further undercut neighborhood schools that lose many students from stable, educated, affluent families to alternative schools or other schools with more advantaged populations.

He said his team sought out likely opponents as well as supporters, and found that the equity issue with neighborhood schools was the chief stumbling block. There also seemed to be a lack of support for housing the school anywhere outside the Churchill region, he said.

Equity is Superintendent Russell's chief worry. He believes Eugene's system of open choice and alternative schools is partly to blame for the aggregation of poverty in certain neighborhood schools, and he said he wants to avoid creating another program that attracts disproportionately few low-income, special education and minority children.

"My hope is that we address these issues on the front end as part of the planning and design to ensure that some of the concerns we've raised about inequitable kinds of practices and disparities are addressed," Russell said. "I think that (Falsgraf) and the people working on it are very cognizant of those issues."

Bethel teacher Kate Adams, who adopted her 5-year-old, Gracie Phoenix, as an infant, said she hopes her daughter would be able to take advantage of the program, even though she'd be too old to start as a kindergartner.

"It would be a huge advantage to her in her life to be bilingual and to be able to go back to China and communicate," said Adams, who was volunteering last week at the UO Chinese camp, now in its second year. "It would open up so many choices to her."

No district schools now have Chinese language instruction, although the private Oak Hill School offered after-school Mandarin classes. Oak Hill will include it in the school-day curriculum this year.

According to the Web site of the Asia Society, which supports and tracks Chinese language programs, Chinese is taught in more than 260 public and private schools nationwide, the majority of them high schools. Falsgraf said Eugene's would be one of just a handful of elementary immersion programs.