First graduating class of Mandarin Immersion Program returns to Bergeson Elementary for special visit

By Theresa Cisneros

The first graduating class from the Capistrano Valley Unified School District’s Mandarin Immersion Program returned to their elementary school for a special gathering to celebrate this year’s seniors and show younger participants how the program can help prepare them for college and career as well.

The 14 Capistrano Valley High School seniors, accompanied by parents and staff, traveled to Marian Bergeson Elementary on April 29, where they visited an area of campus that houses students in the district’s Mandarin Immersion Program.

The group stopped in a third grade classroom, posed for a photo with fifth graders, and took senior class photos in the play yard, all while donning sweatshirts emblazoned with the names of the colleges and universities they’ll attend in the fall, from Stanford to Cornell to USC.

Charlotte Komine, a Mandarin teacher at Capistrano Valley High School who’s been with the program since its inception, said the event aimed to congratulate the graduating seniors and use their successes to show younger scholars how the program can help them, too.

“I think it’s a very sentimental moment for them because they started here and they worked all the way through,” she said. “This kind of determination to stay in the program, I think, needs to be celebrated and their accomplishments shown to the whole community.”

Senior William Pang, who will be studying at UCLA in the fall and has been part of the program since its inaugural year, said he was happy to visit his old elementary school and said that being on campus gave him a chance to reflect on his class’s academic trajectory.

“Being back at Bergeson is very nostalgic,” he said. “Remembering all the fun memories that we had and the beginnings that we came from, and now seeing how all of us have grown and all of us are going off to prestigious colleges is great.”

Senior Natalie La, who is going on to major in statistics and data science at UCLA, said the return visit to Bergeson was “bittersweet.” La participated in the program from grades 4 to 12 and said the skills she obtained through Mandarin immersion helped her connect with her Chinese culture and better communicate with her Mandarin-speaking grandmother.

“Seeing this campus feels like no time has passed, but yet also like so much has happened in between,” she said. “It’s super nostalgic and it’s hard to believe that I was once in these kids’ places sitting in these desks learning alongside these people I’m still next to right now.”

For Oliver, a current third grader in the Mandarin Immersion Program, seeing the seniors return to campus was exciting. Oliver said he likes the program and thinks the teachers are “fun.” Like the students in the program’s inaugural class, he hopes to one day use his Mandarin skills to better communicate with others.

“I will be able to speak Chinese to them so that they can understand me if they don’t understand English as much as Chinese,” he said.

The district’s Mandarin Immersion Program started when the inaugural class was in first grade, said Komine, and has evolved over the years. At first, the inaugural participants were taught 80 percent of the time in Chinese, and 20 percent of the time in English, Komine said. Over time, they moved onto a 70/30 model, then a 50/50 model, and ultimately took just one or two classes in Mandarin at a time, she said.

Over the years, students said they formed a close-knit community with their immersion program peers, and grew to support each other inside the classroom and in outside endeavors as well. Parents said participating in the program in its fledgling years brought them together, too, with some eventually forming a task force and working with school and district representatives to discuss issues ranging from curriculum to programming to the hiring of teachers and more.

“We feel, as parents, that this has been a huge success and that we made it,” said Jennifer Pang, mother of William Pang. “And so, it’s time to celebrate.”

Today, CUSD’s unique Mandarin Immersion Program serves grades K-12. Students begin their studies at Bergeson and matriculate into Fred Newhart Middle School and Capistrano Valley High School. The goal is to ensure that students develop high levels of language proficiency in both English and Mandarin, demonstrate high levels of academic achievement in both languages, and develop an appreciation for and an understanding of diverse cultures.

Parent Paula Yousef said she and her husband enrolled their son, Michael, in the program during its inaugural year for those exact reasons. Her husband is an engineer and often travels to Asia on business, she said, so the couple was looking for a program that would both challenge their son academically and help him develop skills that would serve him well in the future.

As Michael prepares to major in mechanical engineering and minor in Chinese at Johns Hopkins University — and ultimately use his Mandarin skills in the business world — she says she’s glad they enrolled him in the Mandarin Immersion Program all those years ago.
The program has also shown her son how to persevere and see things through from beginning to end, she said, which is a trait she says will set him up for success in college and beyond.

“It was worth every moment,” she said. “We would do it all over again.”

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