Bridge to China: Benefits of controversial program outweigh costs, proponents say

OREM — Above a first-grade classroom door at Cascade Elementary hangs a sign. "No English."

The door is draped in a Chinese flag and Chinese symbols are scattered across the walls under shapes, numbers, pictures of animals and around the clock.

Just two months into school, Weixin Le's first-grade students understand and respond to her in Chinese.

The 50 kids in the Chinese immersion program at the school spend half their day learning math, social studies and science in Chinese and the other half learning language arts in English.

Last week, during their math portion of the class, the teacher wrote four addition and subtraction problems on the board. Speaking only in Mandarin, she asked them to answer one of the problems quietly to their neighbor. Giggling, the children whispered "shi" (pronounced like "sure"), which means 10. Then she asked them to say it loudly, and the children yelled out "shi."

That day, the principal, Doug Finch, sat at the teacher's desk near a red Chinese dress that hung on the wall and watched and learned with the children. He, too, responded in Mandarin.

The Chinese class, he said, wouldn't have come to his school this quickly had it not been for the Chinese Bridge Delegation Program (or Hanban trip), which he attended a few years ago, a program recently scrutinized by state auditors.

The Hanban trip is hosted by the Chinese government twice a year, and administrators and teachers from around the country travel to China to learn about the culture, the people and the advantages of Chinese immersion programs.

This is where Finch, who was then the Alpine curriculum director, said he was sold on the importance of the teaching young children Chinese. When he became principal, he decided to implement it.

But the state auditors office wrote in the October audit of school district travel that, "School districts should consider foregoing the trips until school budgets improve."

Since 2008, 159 Utah educators from 11 Utah school districts have gone to the week-long program, according to the audit. Utahns account for about 10 percent of the U.S. delegates. In 2009 alone, 762 delegates went from 40 states, about 19 delegates per state. Utah sent 83.