HADLEY – Expansion continues to be a driving force at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School both in academics and physical size. For the first time, the school will be a full K-12 program.
It added the 12th and final grade for the 2016-2107 academic year.
Head of School Richard Alcorn said the school remains in a pattern of growth. The school offers immersion in Mandarin Chinese, a tonal intensive language.
Over the past decade, the school has repeatedly added new grades, which has meant expanding its physical space. A multistory addition at its home on Route 9 in Hadley houses the middle and upper grades.
Alcorn said the school has long wanted to arrive at this point. “It’s gratifying we’ve reached the 12th grade.” The school’s goal has always been to establish a full K-12 program.
The school opened in the fall of 2007 and has been growing ever since.
When the school began, the U.S. Department of Education provided funding for a K-8 setting. Parents, he said, worried about their children moving on to high school and out of PVCICS and not be able to retain what they’d learned.
“They were concerned their child would fall off an educational cliff,” said Alcorn, especially with the children maintaining their Chinese language proficiency.
The school succeeded in getting a $1.5 million federal grant to expand to the 12th grade. “In some sense, we’ve fulfilled our commitment to the federal government with the grant money they gave us,” he said.
He said the immersion programs aligns with the federal government’s desire to build a foundation of Chinese speakers in the U.S. Speakers with that fluency are needed in the U.S. State Department, security agencies, state government, business and other professions.
Grant backing stems from the National Security Language Initiative, which promotes the education of American speakers of Chinese.
Alcorn recalled that in the school’s second year, a language instruction consultant reviewing the program, as required by the federal grant, declared that first-graders had become intermediate speakers of Chinese, according to Alcorn.
The consultant noted the students’ interactions and ease with the language. He added that students move to the conversational level early.
“It takes longer to develop higher level proficiency,” he said. The difficulties lies in learning the Chinese characters, which, unlike English, are not phonetically constructed.
A few years ago, the school secured sizable funding from the federal government for the newest building, which included purchasing and renovating the original building off Route 9, the former Kidsports facility.
“We built the addition to temporarily house the high school and to house the growing kindergarten through middle school. We’re only now fully populating the middle school program,” he said. He expects the high school program will grow and eventually move to a new building.
In 2015, the school obtained the International Baccalaureate World School authorization, joining the rates of similar programs worldwide. The international program involves 1 million students in 147 countries.
With the addition of 12th grade, the school’s 500 students represent 30 western Massachusetts communities, including Springfield and Hilltowns.