Reply to CHARTERS MAY MERGE AT WALTER REED (The DC International School, IB Diploma Programme)

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[quote=Anonymous]"Some of these arguments don't really resonate with what I have observed. I know a number of Chinese families residing in DC, and they are really trying to get their kids into Yu Ying, largely because they have the standard problem that many immigrants in the US have. They speak Mandarin at home, but once their kids hit pre-school, the kids switched to English almost entirely. The parents don't feel they can maintain the Mandarin without peer support. I grew up in California, and the weekly heritage language schools that my Asian-American friends attended resulted in about 0% of them actually speaking the language, so I'm not sure my friends regard those as a viable option, and most are in MoCo anyway."

These sound like quite assimilated families.  The kids can't switch to English at home if the family won't play ball - mine never did.  One reason you're not getting many Chinese speakers applying to YY is because bilingual Metro area Chinese who care that their kids learn the language (most) make their own plans.

In our case, we won't answer our kids in English, don't let them watch American kids TV (only cartoons off satellite TV, or DVDS we get from HK) and host a Cantonese-speaking au pair every year.  They get Cantonese-speaking peer support at a heritage school in Rockville on weekends, and will start Mandarin-for-Cantonese-speakers classes there soon.  We visit HK annually.  If we switch to MoCo schools for MS and HS, they can study Mandarin alongside many other dialect speakers.

We'd be interested in YY if there was a good-sized dialect speaking group there, and a Chinese administrator, but no chance.  As far as DCI goes, you will be seeing many more bilingual families coming into the District in the next decade.  If it shapes up to be a good school, you may even get a higher % of such families there than at YY.  In that case, maybe DCI would let our kids enroll in the advanced (partial immersion?) Mandarin classes, although YY won't allow us to after 2nd grade without lottery admissions.

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