Hope Chinese Charter School in Beaverton immerses kids in Mandarin Chinese
 Katie Currid/The OregonianMolly Heywood, one of the founders of Hope Chinese Charter School, puts a helmet on the head of Julian Heywood, 3, as her daughter, Brooklynn, rides her bicycle around the block.Hope Chinese Charter School, housed inside Korean Mission Church in Cedar Hills, will open in September with kindergarten and first grade. Organizers plan to teach three-quarters of the school day in Chinese and the rest in English. The school's founders, a group of parents and educators, expect to add a grade level each school year, eventually reaching eighth grade. Much remains to be done before the fledgling school can open Sept. 4. Church meeting rooms, which are being converted into classrooms, need bulletin boards and books. Walls need fresh paint. Molly Heywood, a parent and chairwoman of the charter school board, is eager to start. Many of the students come from mixed-race families or have parents who work at Intel or Nike, she said, but the school welcomes everybody. "We want to have a public charter school to make this a norm, make it accessible to other kids, low-income kids, different kinds of learners, different nationalities," Heywood said. TO LEARN MORE What: Info session on Hope Chinese Charter School, which is still accepting applications for kindergarten and first grade. When: 6 p.m. Thursday. RSVP requested by Tuesday. Where: 9100 S.W. Wilshire St. Phone: 971-226-7500 Online: hopeccs.org Hope Chinese's debut reflects the recent growth in the number of Portland-area parents eager to raise Chinese-speaking kids. For example, six years ago, a Chinese immersion program at Portland Public Schools struggled to fill its classes. Now, the program receives twice as many applicants as can be accommodated in the entering class's 60 spaces. Many end up on a waiting list, said Michael Bacon, director of the K-16 program. "We've seen a really dramatic increase in demand from parents," Bacon said. "We get requests constantly from people wanting to visit and thinking about moving to the city." That popularity reflects a nationwide trend, Bacon said, citing reports from the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition in Minnesota. At least 75 Chinese programs in public schools began in the past three to four years nationwide. "That's a huge, huge jump," he said. Parents waiting for an open spot in Portland can look to Hope Chinese as another option, organizers said. "We want to reach out to a big demographic," said Heywood, who lives in Sherwood. Looking for an edge Fluency in Chinese offers an advantage in a world increasingly swayed by China's politics and economy, parents say, pointing out its many benefits. Bilingual kids can connect on a deeper cultural level when they travel and work abroad, especially as more corporations do business in China. They'll learn a third or fourth language more quickly. They'll be more open-minded and score higher on tests, according to research cited by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Czarina Boyce, who lives on Bull Mountain, wants her kids to have that edge. She and her husband used to live in Hong Kong, where she said companies often looked at whether job applicants spoke Mandarin Chinese before considering their work background, she said. "It's giving (kids) something that they can use in the future," said Boyce, who will enroll her son in kindergarten at Hope Chinese. "Nobody can take that away from them. We travel a lot, and they have that already, they have that ability to adapt."  Katie Currid/The OregonianBrooklynn Heywood, 6, helps push her brother, Julian, 3, on his bicycle as they ride around the block in their neighborhood. Brooklynn will attend first grade at the Hope Chinese Charter School in the fall.Originally, Oregon Hope Chinese School, a private school for preschool and Saturday classes north of Beaverton, helped parents fill out paperwork for an application to the Beaverton School District. The group of parents soon grew and became a separate organization. Their charter petition was one of four submitted to the district over the past three years. Hope Chinese and Arco Iris were approved. Knova Learning Oregon and Horizons' Outreach were rejected. Charter schools, which encourage alternative types of learning, run independently from the district and have their own board members. The district distributes 80 percent of state per-student funding to the charter and keeps the rest. The district allocated $238,000 to Hope Chinese for the first school year, but the budget could change depending on actual attendance numbers, Heywood said. Enrollment is open to children living outside the district; administrators expect 60 to 75 kids the first year. Donations, fundraisers and kindergarten tuition -- the state funds only half-day kindergarten -- bring in the rest of the money. A gala in April raked in $75,000, and parents of kindergartners can expect to pay $4,950 tuition. Tough language to learn Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead comprises thousands of pictographic characters, can be a difficult language to learn. Compared to English, which is a flat monotone, Mandarin Chinese, the standard dialect of China, has four inflections, like notes in a song. Felix Loo, a bilingual teacher who will lead first grade, recognizes the challenge of teaching a class including kids who already know Chinese and others who know none at all. Though Chinese may be hard to grasp at first, it can still be fun to learn, Loo said. During his previous 16 years of teaching Chinese, he would ask kids to recite and sing Chinese phrases. He once had a sign that read, "Speak Mandarin only, no English." If you broke the rule, you did pushups, he said. Sometimes, he'd be the one to forget. "And then my kids would catch me," Loo said, laughing. Caroline Li, one of the founding board members who lives in Bethany, said she hopes kids will be inspired by their language skills. "We want to give kids the gift they can have forever," she said of Chinese, "the confidence to speak it." |
Comments