Reply to Ward 6 and Miner ES: Grassroots Movement for Dual Language (Mandarin) Program

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Reply to "Ward 6 and Miner ES: Grassroots Movement for Dual Language (Mandarin) Program"

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[quote=warrenox][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Miner will benefit from having a more diverse student body and parent community.  One if my friends is a Miner preschool parent.  She tried to donate new scholastic books to the classroom and met with resistance from the classroom teacher.  Brent and Maury get so many donations from parents.  Miner doesn't know what to do with involved parents.  I would totally have sent my kids to a Mandarin program at Miner.[/quote]

Thats a problem at a lot of gentrifying schools unfortuantely.  There is an attitude to recruit, recruit, recruit new families (ie High SES) to the school but any effort to make changes is met with an attitude of "your new hear and thats not how we do things"--and then people get huffy when high SES families with their high achieving kids bail by 1st, and 2nd grade and the original recruiters accuse the families of being racist and classist.   Mandarin isn't going to fix that dynamic anytime soon.[/quote]

Again, totally agree.  Mandarin as a language isn't going to fix that problem.

Parents that will invest in an immersion program and the school will fix that problem.  So it will require involvement in the school, becoming tone deaf to the obstructionists who always are there to complain "that's not how we do things"...  Getting a good core of those parents/students who are invested in the program will change the school culture.

Just to let you and anyone else that didn't know, there was a group of about 30 parents who have potential inbound students that met in a informal gathering that was organized through word of mouth of friends.  That is parents who most do not even yet have a child old enough to attend Miner.  This was friends and friends of friends.  People who just know each other as neighbors in the community.  That will tell you there is some momentum building to change the school.  That was a big eye opener and there was encouragement to join the PTO, to attend functions for Miner and to get involved.  If that community spirit and involvement starts spreading to other local families, to the teachers at the school looking for parent involvement, to the neighbor down the block with young children, or the parent(s) who have a child in Miner and looking for allies to help the school raise academic standards and test scores, then that will change the school.[/quote]

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