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Washington Yu Ying Public Charter school is the only D.C. school to receive a federal grant that will help support its Chinese immersion program. (Jane Park/MNS)
WASHINGTON — French and Spanish may no longer be students’ second language of choice.
The U.S. Department of Education recently announced that it will issue more than $12.4 million to schools looking to establish or expand existing programs in foreign languages critical to national security. The grants promote the instruction of Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Arabic as well as languages in the Indic, Iranian and Turkic families.
Recipients include education departments, local school districts and individual schools in 24 states and the District of Columbia.
Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School is the only D.C. school to receive a grant – a total of about $290,000 – to bolster its Chinese language immersion program.
Here, young students – ages four to seven – alternate between English and Chinese in all core subjects, every day.
“We were thrilled,” said executive director Mary Shaffner. The grant money will help the school create its own Chinese-language resources and help fund better assessment tools to measure student learning and teacher performance, she said.
Voris Evans-Thomas said learning Chinese will prove to be a necessity for her daughter, a second-grader at Yu Ying.
“Let’s just say that security is still the way that it is, they’re going to need more people to be able to communicate with the foreigners, as well as abroad, so I just feel that it’s very important that she learns a second language to keep up with society,” she said.
Shaffner said the long-term investment starts in the classroom. These young, bilingual students will benefit years down the road.
“I think their parents chose this to help them get jobs potentially in the State Department or in other national security fields, and also in business. But this will give them hopefully an advantage when they’re looking for a job, when they’re going to college,” Shaffner said.