By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Mandarin Chinese and Spanish will be introduced to kindergartners to fourth graders starting next fall.
At Monday night’s school board meeting, Enrique Pincay, the district’s world language supervisor, described a task force recommendation the board endorsed unanimously.
School administrators now will begin to write curriculum and hire teachers — three for Chinese and three for Spanish. In September, the administration estimated a salary of $51,245 and benefits package of $17,994 for each, bringing the total commitment to $415,434. Finding certified teachers of Chinese may be the difficult part of that effort.
The teachers would be assigned to an elementary school for one-half of a year.
Implicit in teaching Chinese in the youngest grades, the district was committing itself, a year at a time, to implementing the language in all grades through high school.
Board member Greg Gillette questioned if the results of a community survey showed enough of a response to justify implementing Chinese. About 13 percent of approximately 550 respondents thought Chinese was the most important for students to learn, and 62 percent said Spanish, according to Mr. Pincay.
There seemed to be too great an allocation of resources for not much community response, Mr. Gillette said.
He asked if the district was committing based on temporal assumptions about the world economy. If this were 1985, he said, and the board decided to teach Japanese based on its economic strength, it would have made a mistake, he said.
Board member Jennifer Haley disagreed. She said when she ran for election this year, she emphasized the need to meet the challenge of the global economy. She called the vote “a great step for our future.”
Board member Christopher Pulsifer suggested parents of elementary school children weren’t looking as far ahead as the task force. If the survey had been targeted to junior and senior high school parents, the numbers would have been higher, he said.
“I don’t think we should do nothing because in 15 years we might look back and be wrong,” he said.
Board member Thuy Anh Le said it was important students be exposed to different dialects at a young age. Mr. Pincay said the task force considered research that suggested the younger students begin to study a language, the greater the proficiency in older grades.
“Good language is good language,” said board member Marc Rosenberg. If Hillsborough had started a successful Japanese program 20 years ago, “I’d be pretty proud,” he said.
Board member Judith Haas said she was “very excited” the board was moving ahead and hoped “everyone
would approach this with an open mind.”
The task force, which included principals, district supervisors and world language teachers, met in June, July, September and October.
The decision will bring Hillsborough schools back into compliance with state requirements to teach world language in all grades. Hillsborough dropped world language in the youngest grades in 2009 because of the need to cut the overall school budget.
Hillsborough high and middle schools offer five languages: French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.
The task force report looked at three options for K-4: introduce French, German, Hindi, Italian, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese; teach Spanish only, or offer Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
Chinese and Spanish are the two most spoken languages in the world, the report said. Spanish is the second most-spoken language in the U.S., and Chinese is third.
