The Indiana Academy of Science, Mathematics, and Humanities received a $378,279 grant from the U.S. Department of Education Friday to begin a three-year Mandarin Chinese program. The Academy, located on University Avenue, west of the L.A. Pittenger Student Center, is overseen by Ball State University.
The Academy requested the grant through the U.S. Department of Education's Federal Language Assistant Program, Kevin Burke, director of University Communications, said.
"A distance learning modular will be produced in classrooms at Burris Laboratory School and the Indiana Academy," said David Williams, executive co-director and director of Academic Affairs of the Indiana Academy. "Then, they will be formatted for distance learning that will allow any school to use them."
Burris is a K-12 school and part of the Muncie Community School system, while the Academy is a high school for gifted Indiana juniors and seniors.
The three-year grant allots $122,534 for the first year of the program, Williams said.
"Most of the funds will cover salaries, programming costs and production costs," Burke said.
The Mandarin Chinese lessons will be filmed in the classrooms, then be made available for distribution across the country.
Chinese is the second most widely-spoken non-English language in the U.S. with about 2 million speakers, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, yet less than one percent of American high school students study the language.
As part of President Bush's National Security Language Initiative, the U.S. Department of Education plans to increase the number of Americans studying Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Farsi and other languages by granting $8.7 million to school districts in 20 states.
For the 2007-08 academic year, the Academy will produce an educational DVD for fourth graders and a "Chinese I" DVD for high school students. The following two years, the school will produce a "Chinese II" DVD for fifth graders, as well as a "Chinese III" DVD for sixth graders.
The Indiana Academy will film a total of 30 to 36 modules.
"Too few speak languages like Arabic, Chinese and Farsi at a time when communication is vital to a peaceful world," said U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in a press release. "We hope these funds will enable more students to become fluent in critical languages."
Indiana school districts will be selected as test sites for the live broadcasts or downloadable videos produced by the Indiana Academy. The Academy was the only school in Indiana to receive the grant.
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