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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] You got lucky. If LAMB started it's charter today it would not have the luxury of two lotteries. LAMB two-charter exception was granthfathered in under the old charter laws. So it is mighty fine of you to sit on your high horse and say what you would and should do when not faced with the same circumstances and rules. In addition, I would say that the combined Hispanic community with it's multiple ethnicities quadruple the small DC Chinese community.  There are more hispanics to go around, even if the only thing they may have in common is a shared language with varying dialects.   [/quote]

LAMB guy here.  So your school doesn't have an administrator who can speak to the local community and the parents association isn't asking for one because they have "no power."  You don't do outreach because you're focused on building a playground and a middle school.  You drive out bilinguals you get by making their kids feel rotten for eating their ethnic food.  But you just want your children to learn Mandarin right, never mind all this Chinese culture and community crap.

We don't have a lot of Spanish speakers because we have a lottery for them,  we have them because we understand that they add value and treat 'em right, on their terms.  You people are pathetic and need your heads examined.  [/quote]

Wow. That is really an unnecessarily cynical summary of this discussion. What I've gotten from this thread is that for the local Chinese community to feel welcome at YY, there probably needs to be a certain number of other like families at the school. Enough of a population so non-Chinese families get to know their culture just by having them as part of the school community, so there is no undue burden of educating non-Chinese families about cultural norms and no one feels like tokens. We've established that charter rules make it difficult to get those numbers but that better outreach to the Chinese community could help. YY has tried that and I'm guessing is working diligently on strategies to continue trying (they just don't post the progress of such efforts here on DCUM). Certainly YY school leaders don't want to run a Chinese immersion school without Chinese speakers. Now, though, since some in that community have had negative experiences as "tokens" at the school, it seems the challenge to convince enough of those families to be firsts without an established existing Chinese population will be even greater. The outreach team will need to pursue creative approaches to have a better chance of bridging the gap (in addition to just telling them to get their applications in first). I'll throw some benefit of the doubt their way and consider they probably know this and are hard at work--YY school leaders have exceeded expectations in many other ways. And I at least am aware that I and everyone else on this board can only guess what they're doing. Strange how people love to assume the worst.[/quote]

I think we've established LAMB guy is an idiot. ;)[/quote]

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