The San Francisco Unified School District will create a new Mandarin-immersion program in a Noe Valley school that was, until the district shuttered it last year, a program for students and families first arriving in the United States from Spanish-speaking countries.
Interest is high for Mandarin-immersion programs among San Francisco parents, a district spokesperson said, and SFUSD has been unable to meet demand.
The only Mandarin-immersion programs in the city for elementary school students, at Jose Ortega and Starr King elementary schools, are close to, or are at full capacity.
The newcomer program at the Mission Education Center at 1670 Noe St., which opened in 1973, was, on the other hand, under-enrolled: At the end of 2025, it had only 11 students.
The district announced the center’s closure last spring and cited decreased enrollment. The 46-year-old program was designed to help elementary school-aged children and their families adapt to life in the United States by offering them specialized education and social services during their first year in the country.
Immigrant parents and educators, however, accused SFUSD of undercutting the Mission Education Center by discouraging newcomer parents from enrolling their children there — and abruptly transferring children who were already at the center to other schools.
When parents asked for an explanation, some reported being told this was done for their protection, in the event of an immigration raid.
Cassondra Curiel, the teachers union president, taught at a school with a full newcomer program, and said the Trump administration lowered newcomer school demand.
Curiel said that there is no correlation between the newcomer program being shut down and the Mandarin-immersion school’s site, which is temporary.
The new school will eventually become a full TK-8 school — the school district aims to identify a permanent site by January 2027 — but will start with a transitional-kindergarten classroom and three kindergarten classrooms.
Alida Fisher, a school board member, agreed and said the Mission Education Center site was selected “intentionally” to avoid displacing families, as it had largely shuttered. It currently houses a transitional kindergarten that will stay at the site.
“There could be some optical issues here in displacement of immigrant families,” Fisher said. “I think we need to be really, really careful, and we are trying to be very intentional as a board to make sure that we are not displacing families that are there.”
She said the district needs to improve its newcomer programs as well.
The new Mandarin immersion program will eventually be for students in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade. The new program will be present at the Oct. 24 SFUSD enrollment fair, where families can learn about the district’s offerings.
“This is an exciting moment for San Francisco families who have been asking for a TK-8 Mandarin Immersion school,” said Maria Su, the district superintendent.
Try and practice more responsible journalism instead of relying on click bait titles that are clearly designed to elicit an emotional response by putting ethnic groups against one another. This city is NOT a museum, space should be utilized to it’s fullest potential and if that means moving students to smaller accommodations to meet the needs of the growing demand for Mandarin language immersion then so be it.
This new school also does not take away from the many Spanish language offerings SFUSD already has at 9 different campuses but this article does absolutely nothing to mention or point that out. It isn’t an either/or proposition and SFUSD is simply responding to what a growing body of current SF parents want. Change is necessary to stave off further decline in enrollment and parents choosing private because public schools aren’t offering what they want.
Do better!
Hello —
From one San Francisco parent to another, this was a factual headline. And if you don’t think the district put the squeeze on MEC, you clearly haven’t spoken to the teachers, staff and parents there.
Yours,
JE
I’d really like to see reporters do a more objective job of interviewing and gathering information for a story. I have been a parent in the district for a decade now and in that entire time MEC has been ridiculously underenrolled while families in Noe Valley have opted for private schools because they were unable to find spots at Rooftop, Alvarado, and Fairmount/Dolores Huerta. MEC should’ve converted to a Spanish Immersion elementary school long ago and allowed General Education students to have all the spots at Alvarado. But anyway, for the past two years MEC has housed *several,* not one, TK class and also a tuition-paying PreK class. Now there are five TK classes, three of them Spanish Immersion and two of them feeding into General Ed programs at other elementary schools. There have been numerous Bilingual-Bicultural classrooms for monolingual Spanish speaking newcomers located in Glen Park, Mission, Excelsior, and the Portola—maybe more neighborhoods—for a long time so it seems to me that turning MEC (not even in the Mission) to an Early Education Center for multiple programs is pretty smart.