By Amy Kapatkin, Rui Chen and Ying Fang

The earlier children learn a second language, the more likely they are to master it. Although the Davis Joint Unified School District supports five world languages, there is bias toward Spanish and French because they are the only two languages offered at the junior high level.

Theoretically, any junior high student can take one of the other three languages at Davis High School, but the scheduling often makes it impossible for junior high students to continue consecutively in that chosen language. Because these other languages cannot be easily started until ninth grade, the children are less likely to take them. In addition, they have less opportunity to take them to the Advanced Placement levels.

Based on our survey, other reasons students start taking foreign language classes available to them in junior high include acquisition of three to four years of foreign language education required for admission by many universities, and the possibility of completing AP levels to increase their competitiveness in college admission.

Chinese (Mandarin) is the least-supported language by the school district among the five world languages. The district offers four levels of Chinese, whereas it offers five levels of Japanese and six levels of French, Spanish and German.

Chinese is an important future global language, and schools all over the world have started to institute more Chinese programs. Chinese classes in the Davis schools are given at times in a way that make it impossible to consecutively take Level 2 after Level 1 for junior high students.

This year, there is an unreasonable combination of different levels at DHS (for example, combining Level 1 with 3 and Level 2 with 4). Parents are told this is necessary because Chinese is not a popular program or that it is a low-enrollment program. One reason for low enrollment in the DHS Chinese program is that there is no access to Chinese at the junior high level. Offering Chinese at the junior high level will make the Chinese program at DHS more sustainable.

A parent group has organized to support Chinese language programs in Davis schools (http://groups.dcn.org/clp). In particular, the group advocates Chinese language programs at the junior high level, starting at Holmes in the 2012-13 school year. Holmes Principal Derek Brothers has been supportive of our request, and Holmes revised its 2012-13 course requests to indicate that Chinese “may be taught at Holmes.”

We encourage all incoming seventh- through ninth-graders, including Harper students who are considering taking Chinese as their world language, to enroll in Chinese at Holmes. If the enrollment is sufficient for Holmes to offer a Chinese class this year, the trend may continue, and more Chinese classes may be available in future years. Holmes course requests for the incoming eighth- and ninth-graders are due Saturday.

We hope the school district, DHS and Holmes will work together to decide on the location of the class based on enrollment and the best interest of our students. If Chinese can be offered only at the high school, we hope the school district can ensure that the schedule will allow junior high school students to continue beyond Level I.

— Amy Kapatkin, Rui Chen and Ying Fang are Davis residents.

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