The Blue Valley School District may soon cut its Chinese Immersion program in half.
After months of trying to find a way to sustain the program, the district’s Chinese Immersion task force recently reached a final recommendation to send forward to the Blue Valley Board of Education at its next meeting.
The district may condense the program
- At its final meeting on Oct. 24, the task force voted to choose one of four proposals — all of which involved transitioning the program to one school building instead of two.
- “Proposal B”, the one going forward to the school board, entails eliminating Valley Park Elementary as a CI program site and establishing Wolf Springs Elementary as the only site.
- If approved, enrollment would remain open to the entire district, with the “possibility to expand to two sites” in the future and an enrollment cap of 54 kindergarten students.
- The proposal also includes a new bilingual “Instructional Design Team” district-level position that would help oversee the program’s curriculum.
CI parents want to keep Valley Park in the program
Some parents view the decision to eliminate Valley Park Elementary as a Chinese Immersion program site as an equity issue, given that parents who live in the boundary of the elementary school may be unable to afford a home in the Wolf Springs Elementary boundary or to drive their children there each day.
“This whole component of equity to is so huge because in choosing that school down on the edge of the district on 179th Street, you’re in the middle of a neighborhood where the average selling price of a home is now over $1 million,” said Valley Park Elementary parent Will Clough, who followed the meetings but was not on the task force. “There’s much more diversity up in (the northern) part of the district.”
Others also felt that there was a lack of transparency about what constituted as “administratively viable” and what a “potential to expand” the program in the future could look like.
“It also felt like the feeling in the room seemed like a lot of people thought, ‘Well, if we don’t vote for one of these proposals, then what happens?’” said Valley Park Elementary parent Kellen Lutz, who also attended the task force’s meetings but was not a member. “Does this go back to the drawing board for another however many months? Another six months, nine months, do we even have anything next year?”
The district says Valley Park is already getting full
One of the driving points the district has pointed to for rationale on condensing the Chinese Immersion program was an increased strain on Valley Park Elementary, which is close to capacity.
In place of condensing the program to one site, some parents argued that the district could help alleviate the pressure on the school by expanding the program to other elementary schools.
“Offering immersion programs across the district means that those resources are distributed across the district, which takes strain off of the school,” said Valley Park Elementary parent and Chinese Immersion task force member Heather Astill. “I think parents really should rally together to get more immersion programs because they are incredible. They change the way our young children’s minds think and how they see the world.”
Other parents wondered if keeping the program active at Valley Park Elementary might create other forms of inequity.
Valley Park Elementary parent Rachel Johnson, a parent whose student previously participated in the Chinese Immersion program, said potentially moving the primary program site further south could create financial and logistic challenges for families. However, families living within the Valley Park Elementary boundary might also be less likely to afford a private tutor if their Chinese Immersion student needed extra language help that the school lacked the bandwidth to provide, she added.
Conversely, she said, having fewer students in the program might help ease the burden on teachers and thus strengthen the program.
“Without question, finding the Mandarin-speaking teachers is the hardest part of the program,” Johnson said. “If you’ve got (teachers) coming back year after year, and they’re fully licensed, and they work well with each other, and they’ve got that history with the school, that’s going to be great.”
The board will review the proposal in two weeks
- The Blue Valley Board of Education will review the task force’s final proposal at its Nov. 13 meeting.
- After review and discussion this month, the board will take final action at its following meeting in December.
- The school board will take public comments before making a decision.
- The district will form the next steps and communicate those to parents in December and January.
Go deeper: Find more information about the proposal here.
