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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] No, it doesn't have the requisite population.  Posters keep mentioning NYC - Flushing, Chinatown; San Fran; Vancouver; Sydney, etc.  DC has a population just over 600,000.  The population of Queens, NY - only one of the boroughs, not NYC - is over 2 million.  The Chinese population in DC is less than 1%, under 6,000 people most of whom are not 4/5 yr olds - entry yr for YY, and most of them are not bilingual Mandarin speakers. [quote]

I'm not Chinese but your assessment doesn't sound fair.  They're not talking about preference for Cantonese speakers, that's been made clear.  They're talking about a lottery for bilingual kids using any dialect, they could even be non-Chinese kids who learned Mandarin while living in China, or from nannies.

They haven't argued that they could find enough bilingual kids to reach a 50/50 balance with English speakers, they think they could find 1/4 tops.  That would be more than the Hebrew speakers at their charter, a lot more.

Moreover, the school could be smaller than YY, like MV. Doesn't sound like they're bitching, sounds like they're looking ahead.  If the charter board were  reasonable enough to allow two lotteries for immersion schools, as in other US cities, and if YY had built strong ties to the DC Chinese community, this fraught discussion wouldn't be taking place.

What is your concern, that the two-way immersion model might actually fly?   It is the one used in the majority of the other Chinese immersion schools in the country.  Give 'em a break, the more Chinese-speaking kids in DC the better.

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