17-year-old Lauren Griganavicius had just completed her first year of Mandarin in 8th grade in 2022 when it was cut from the school district’s offerings. District officials cited low enrollment numbers. Also, the part-time teacher, who needed full-time work, resigned and it was difficult to find a replacement coming off the pandemic.
Griganavicius said it’s time to bring it back. There are plenty of teachers now to teach the language.
“We just had trouble finding a teacher due to the demographic changes and the geopolitical tensions and stuff. But after COVID and with the new demographic changes, there are more opportunities to find teachers. I've been in contact with Asian organizations, and they've been giving me resources that help me, that helps to find teachers,” she said.
Griganavicius said she’ll be asking the school board at their meeting Tuesday to survey parents and students to see who is interested in learning Chinese.
“We just need to see if we have the demand for it. But I've been advocating by going up to parked cars to parents in their parked cars in elementary schools, and I it seems like a lot of the parents really want this program to come back, but it's just really up to an actual survey,” she said.
The survey she said will also ask what parents think about adding Chinese as a dual-immersion language that would start in elementary school, like French and Spanish.
She currently is running a poll on change.org.
Griganavicius has continued studying Chinese on her own, taking online classes. She’s learned quickly as her mother is Chinese. And although Chinese is more difficult to learn than other languages, she believes it offers students more economic opportunity in the long run.
According to the language learning program Babbel, there are more than 900 million native Mandarin speakers, the largest number in the world. More people speak English than any other language in the world, but there are only an estimated 380 million native English speakers.
She believes we should be teaching secondary languages that help students compete with world powers, especially ones that are challenging the United States’ military and economic dominance.
“China is the second largest economy in the world, so I just feel like with like this country having that much power, I feel like it's a very good opportunity for students just to be able to learn this language,” she said.
Park City was the first school district in the state to teach Mandarin starting in 2002. Former school board member Val Chin and travel specialist Shirley Smith started offering student exchange tours to China in 1993, where high school students from both Beijing and Park City got to spend time in each other’s countries every few years. The last exchange happened in the fall of 2019.
