Emory University and Atlanta Public Schools met with officials from Houston’s Chinese Consulate General May 9 about instituting a Chinese language and cultural program in an Atlanta middle school that would serve as a model for other schools across Georgia.

Directors of Emory’s East Asian Studies program and administrators from Atlanta’s public school system have submitted a proposal to the consulate to house a “Confucius Institute” in Sammye E. Coan Middle School in the Kirkwood community of Atlanta, near Decatur.

The institute would be a hub for Chinese language and culture learning for students, teachers, businesspeople and interested members of the community. 

It would also develop a kindergarten through 12th grade Chinese language instruction program that could be implemented throughout Georgia public schools, according to Doug Wood, a parent and resident of Kirkwood who helped develop the proposal.

If supported by the consulate, the institute would get $100,000 per year for three years from the Chinese government, in addition to thousands of resources including books and a full-time staff person from China, Mr. Wood said.

Making sure Georgians are educated about Chinese language and culture is especially important to the Chinese, according to Weiping Zha, consul and director of education offices at the consulate in Houston, who led the visiting consular delegation to Atlanta.

“It has become very important in recent years.  Atlanta is developing very fast and has many links to China,” Mr. Zha told GlobalAtlanta. He also said that government officials were aware of Atlanta’s public and private sector effort to open a direct flight between Atlanta and Shanghai and were very supportive.

Currently more than 150 Confucius Institutes exist around the world, and about 20 are in the United States, Mr. Zha said. 

The Houston consulate, which has an eight-state jurisdiction across the Southeast, has helped to develop three Confucius Institutes, he said, in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.  And it has received inquiries from universities in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi to start ones as well.

Generally, the consulate collaborates with a university to open the institute in the hope that it will then develop the program throughout the region, Mr. Zha said.

Developing a language program for the region is exactly what Emory academics and Atlanta public school administrators have in mind.

“The synergy we provide here will be very efficient on a larger scale,” Joachim Kurtz, director of Emory’s East Asian Studies Program and professor of Chinese language and literature, told Mr. Zha, suggesting that once a language program were developed, it would be applicable to communities throughout the state.

Emory plans to provide teacher training, develop benchmarks for testing and institute academic and teacher exchanges with Nanjing University, a Chinese university that it developed a partnership with earlier this year.

Atlanta educators are also intent upon teaching their students Chinese, having begun research on the effort more than a year ago, said Mr. Wood, who works with international trade-consulting firm Market Access International Inc.

Fred A. Toomer Elementary School, which sends students to Coan middle school, the proposed site of the Confucius Institute, received a grant last year from the state of Georgia to research Chinese language programs.

As a part of the research, the school’s principal, Tonya Saunders traveled to schools in Chicago; Portland, Ore., and Washington to learn about Chinese language programs there. 

She has since instituted four in-service training sessions for Toomer elementary school teachers to sensitize them to Chinese language and culture learning.

“If we develop a Chinese language program for grades K through 12, and these kids become fluent, they’ll have all sorts of scholarship opportunities,” Ms. Saunders said about her motives for instituting such a program.

And Dr. Kurtz from Emory agreed.

“It would certainly give these students an edge,” he said. 

Of the 130 students currently studying Chinese at Emory, about 90 of them started the program without any background in the language, Dr. Krutz said.