Support Chinese school The project will require patience and diligence.

Anyone skeptical about the potential value of a Chinese language immersion school in Eugene should take a field trip to Wal-Mart. The "Made in China" labels are in English, but the workers who made the goods that stock the shelves speak, read and think in Chinese. Communication with those people should be a two-way street.

The seed for a Chinese immersion school in the Eugene School District has already been planted in the form of a written proposal. The district ought to offer fertile soil; it already has immersion programs in Spanish, French and Japanese. The Eugene district has pioneered such programs in the past; when it opened in 1988 Yujin Gakuen was the nation's first public Japanese immersion school.

Yet the existence of language immersion schools should not be taken as evidence that starting one is easy. Many obstacles must be surmounted, including some that did not exist when alternative education programs proliferated in Eugene's public school system. Making a Chinese school a reality would require a tremendous amount of effort, sustained over a long period.

Creating such a program is not simply a matter of hiring a couple of people to teach Chinese. In an immersion school, the second language is not a separate subject of study. Students study regular subjects in a second language. Half of the courses in the Eugene district's existing immersion programs are in English, and half - science, math or social studies, for example - are in the second language. A Chinese school that followed the same model would need a curriculum that reinforced learning in both languages from kindergarten through high school, along with teachers qualified to handle such challenging work.

The task of curriculum and staff development would take place at a time when the district's alternative schools are under close scrutiny. Any hint that the Chinese project was diverting resources from existing programs would be fatal. Supporters of a Chinese program made a good move by identifying the Churchill High School region as a desirable location; the existing language immersion schools feed into the district's other three high schools, which means that a fourth in the Churchill region would correct a geographic imbalance.

Adding any new educational enterprise while the Eugene School District is in a long-term period of contraction would present further difficulties. Declining enrollment and budgetary constraints are creating pressure for school closures and consolidations, which means that finding a building and other resources for the Chinese school would be hard. Supporters of the Chinese school could expect to face ready-made resentments if their program began taking shape while long-established schools were shutting down or merging.

Yet the organizers of a Chinese language school should find many allies as well, both locally and nationally. The benefits of giving young people an understanding of the Chinese language and culture are obvious - Mandarin Chinese has more native speakers than any language on Earth, and their global influence is growing every day. Americans' interest in the Chinese language is growing at a rate that suggests the school would not have trouble attracting students. In 2005, 40,000 people in the United States took China's official Chinese proficiency test, up from 2,000 in 1990.

Most important, the Chinese school project is a way to give an additional group of students the gift of a second language. It's a gift most readily received when young, and it brings a new way of seeing the world. When a group comes forward offering this gift to scores, and perhaps one day hundreds, of Eugene's children, the general response should be broadly positive.