District Reinstates Elementary School World Language, Adds Chinese

 After renewing its World Language program in township elementary schools, the district hopes to have students learning Spanish and Mandarin Chinese in the 2012 school year.

The program, slated to launch in Sept. 2012, will require the district to hire six teachers and develop curriculum for the program. The district would hire three Spanish teachers and three Mandarin Chinese teachers, and students would receive half a year of Spanish instruction and half a year of Chinese, according to Enrique Pincay, the district’s World Language supervisor.

Curriculum writing for the program would occur during the summer, according to Assistant Superintendent Lisa Antunes. In addition, the teachers hired would be on the lowest rung of the district’s salary guide, though Antunes did not have the exact salary immediately available.

The district cut its original program during the 2009-2010 school year, after a reduction in state funding. Discussions to re-introduce the program, which the district is require to have, began earlier this year.

The discussions led to the creation of a 12-person task force to evaluate re-introducing the program. The taskforce included administrators and teachers from each district school, according to Pincay.

It also incorporated an online survey with input from Hillsborough’s parents, community, staff and students. The survey garnered 558 responses, with 85 percent coming from parents, 15 percent coming from the community, 10 percent coming from staff members and 1 percent coming from students, Pincay said.

In addition to polling participants on offering a summer program and offering afterschool, paid language instruction, the survey asked participants to choose the languages that were most important for students to learn. Of the responses, 62 percent favored Spanish as the most important language while Mandarin Chinese received 13 percent of the responses, snagging the second spot.

The 13 percent of votes for Mandarin Chinese concerned one Board of Education member, who thought it reflected a lack of interest in the language.

“I don’t think many people are interested in having their children learn Chinese,” Greg Gillette said. “I don’t agree with this preparing for the world. If this were 1985, we would have had Japanese.   .   .I don’t know if this is a mistake now because it seems like China is where it’s at on the world stage. I think this is a considerable resource from non much community support.”

The district considered the survey responses, other districts offering the language, the government’s list of critical languages and economic projections when making its decision, Pincay said.

“We also discussed other districts that are offering Chinese,” Pincay said. “We also looked at the fact that they’re projected to be one of the three main economies during the next ten years.  .  .I think we have a responsibility to prepare our students for this type of global marketplace.”

Other board members were not as worried about offering the language.

“The idea was that this task force was representing primarily elementary school parents,” Chris Pulsifer said. “I think that parents of elementary school children may not be looking as far ahead. .  .I think if you targeted junior high and high school parents .  .  you would have seen much higher.”

“Good language learning is good language learning,” Marc Rosenberg said. “I think it's important that we should move into Asian languages.”

The district would be committed to offering Mandarin Chinese up to senior year of high school, though the district would phase in the program for later grades.