County proposes to end Chinese immersion program at Paint Branch Elementary

Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) has proposed an end to the 12-year-old Chinese immersion program at Paint Branch Elementary School in College Park.

If the Board of Education (BOE) votes to accept the proposal, the program, which every Paint Branch Elementary School student participates in, will discontinue before the start of the next school year in August.

The proposed cuts are part of an effort by interim School Superintendent Shawn Joseph to shave $150 million from the fiscal year 2027 public schools budget. This comes during a year when the county is facing a budget gap of at least $58.3 million—it originally was projected at $91.6 million—and is unlikely to fund public schools above the bare legal minimum mandated by the state.

“To just put it simply,” Shavonne Smith, director of PGCPS Budget and Management Services, told more than 100 parents and others who attended a Feb. 3 Zoom meeting to discuss the county’s proposal, “our expenses are growing more than twice as fast as our funding. … We can’t continue to operate business as usual.”

Under the proposal, the Chinese immersion program at Greenbelt Middle School would phase out once the eighth-graders already enrolled in the program graduate. Incoming sixth-graders would no longer be admitted into the program.

Likewise, Largo High School will phase out its Chinese immersion program once the school’s current ninth-graders graduate.

According to PGCPS, the county spent $1.9 million on Chinese immersion programs during the 2024-2025 school year. The Paint Branch program accounted for $1.2 million of that, while Greenbelt Middle School’s effort cost $525,000 and Largo High School’s was $169,000. Program administration totaled $10,000.

PGCPS Chief Academic Officer Judith White said Paint Branch’s costs are high because it is a boundary school; that is, it must admit all students from the neighborhoods it is zoned to serve. That means that children who move into the area when they are in grades higher than kindergarten have to be brought up to speed with Mandarin before they can join their already-fluent classmates in classes that are taught in Chinese.

“We have to staff twice as much as other programs because children are coming through at various times,” White said, noting that because not all of the students start Mandarin lessons together in kindergarten, two teachers are needed in some classrooms.

She noted that “it’s very had to find teachers to teach Chinese … so every year we’re changing the model to try to provide a rich program for students in a way that it was not designed for.”

The proposal recommends that the schools transition from immersion programs to world language classes, which typically are taught in English and offered for 45 minutes once or twice a week. Paint Branch students would take Mandarin as stand-alone language instruction.

Conversely, in the immersion model, all Paint Branch students take Chinese language classes taught in Mandarin, along with math and science lessons taught in Chinese. In addition, they  learn English, social studies and health from English-speaking teachers.

White told parents on the Zoom that the Paint Branch class would look different from language courses at other schools because all of the students have already learned Mandarin.

Multiple parents of current and former Paint Branch students objected to the superintendent’s plan to dismantle the school’s immersion program during the Feb. 3 Zoom meeting and at BOE  meetings in early February.

“We specifically moved here for it,” Dawn Bott, a lead parent advocate at Paint Branch, said.  “This is uniquely upsetting, very disruptive to my family.”

In an interview with College Park Here & Now after the meeting, organizer Alexandra “Sasha” Tyukavina, another Paint Branch parent whose children speak Russian, Chinese and English, said the county representatives presented the world languages option “as though this is a great thing for you. No … this replacement program they’re proposing, it’s just not adequate.”

The existing setup, Tyukavina noted, “is valuable.”

Tyukavina has started a petition to “use as a bargaining chip” as BOE prepares for a Feb. 26 vote on the superintendent’s proposed budget. 

Paint Branch parents “understand that there is a budget shortfall,” College Park City Councilmember Kelly Jordan (District 2), whose four children participated in the Chinese immersion program at Paint Branch, said in an interview. “But we would like this program to continue. We would like to see a program for the students to continue learning Chinese in an immersion setting.”

A few parents at the meeting objected to mandatory participation of all Paint Branch students in the immersion program, however, noting that they would prefer voluntary enrollment that gives parents the choice to opt out.

Largo High School’s French and Spanish immersion programs also are phasing out, as is Central High School’s French program. The Spanish immersion program at Capitol Heights Elementary School is also targeted in the superintendent’s $3 billion proposed budget.

The proposal does not suggest ending Spanish programs at specialty lottery schools offering immersion programs, including Overlook, Phyllis E. Williams and César Chávez; or the French programs at Dora Kennedy or Maya Angelou.