Toomer Elementary students perform an umbrella dance at the opening ceremony of the Confucius Institute of Atlanta. Photo by Scott King. See the full story about the Confucius Institute and more photos HERE.

Sammye E. Coan Middle School just started offering Chinese language courses this school year, and interest has been so great that its leadership is already looking to hire another teacher.

Andre Williams, Coan’s principal, told GlobalAtlanta that he aims to get approval from Atlanta Public Schools to hire another full-time Chinese-speaking faculty member to start as early as next year. 

Because of the novelty of Mandarin Chinese, many students have jumped at the chance to learn it, he said. 

That’s fine with Dr. Williams.  With China’s growing role in the global economy, students will need knowledge of the country’s language and culture to stay competitive in the workplace, he said. 

“It’s a language that I would love to have every single one of my students learn.  China is going to be the world’s largest economy, people say in five to 10 years, so we definitely want to position as many folks as we can to be part of that,” Dr. Williams said. 

Located in east Atlanta’s Kirkwood community, Coan began a pilot program in the fall of 2007 to teach Chinese to its sixth and seventh graders.

March Wang, a graduate of Emory University and Coan’s only Chinese teacher thus far, currently teaches two yearlong class sections along with two classes that last for nine-week periods.

Mr. Wang is also co-director of the newly inaugurated Confucius Institute of Atlanta, a Chinese government-funded language and cultural learning center housed at Coan and administered by Emory in partnership with Atlanta Public Schools and Nanjing University in Jiangsu province, China.

On March 19, officials from the Chinese consulate in Houston, Emory University and Atlanta Public Schools convened at Coan to formally open the center.

Posters with Chinese vocabulary, student artwork and cutouts of the sage Confucius himself adorn the freshly painted yellow walls of the center, which occupies an open room that used to be the school’s technology lab.

Shelves in a resource room are somewhat bare as they await initial disbursement of more than 3,000 books from the consulate, which has pledged $100,000 per year in funding over the institute’s first three years of operation.

The offices are also empty, designated for faculty from Nanjing who will arrive sometime within the next few months to facilitate the institute’s wide variety of programs.

With support from the Chinese government and the Atlanta community, Mr. Wang said Coan’s Chinese program could eventually become very language intensive.  That could help students achieve proficiency quickly, despite the perception that Chinese is too difficult for Westerners to master.

“The misconception that Chinese is difficult is such a joke.  It’s a very simple language.  Once you pick it up you can run with it,” said Mr. Wang, who moved from China to the U.S. when he was 12 and polished his Chinese by studying at Emory.

About one-fourth of the school’s 347 students have been exposed to Chinese so far, said Doug Wood, an independent trade consultant Market Access International Inc.  As a matter of personal interest and concern for students in his community, Mr. Wood has worked to bring Chinese instruction to Atlanta schools.

An active resident of Kirkwood, Mr. Wood has lobbied for a kindergarten through 12th grade track for students of Chinese within the Atlanta public school system, a dream that will be realized when Coan’s seventh graders begin learning Chinese in eighth grade next year. 

New teacher or not, Dr. Williams expects the interest in Chinese from his students will only grow.

“It’s something new, and (the students) are curious, and they also know that it’s something big, having the Confucius Institute here and having that language here,” he said.  “So it kind of make’s them feel special.”

Dr. Williams is working with his counterpart Southside High School to make sure his students have access to Chinese instruction after their time at Coan.

Toomer Elementary School, which feeds students into Coan, offers Chinese to students in varying levels of intensity from kindergarten through fifth grade.