Before last year, Kristin Epstein lacked a formal background in education administration. She spoke no Mandarin. The West Windsor resident had no connection to Chinese culture.
This past May, she was appointed executive director of the YingHua International School, a Mandarin language non-profit private elementary school in Princeton.
People, says Epstein, are often perplexed when they hear this. But she says the role is a natural fit.
Epstein grew up in Atlanta, raised by her father, an atmospheric scientist, and her mother, a homemaker. Epstein earned an environmental engineering degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and worked as an engineer for 10 years before becoming a stay-at-home mom and full-time educational volunteer and advocate.
Her husband, John, is an ophthalmologist. They met as students at Princeton and fell in love with the area. When a job opening at Princeton Eye Group came up, they jumped at the chance and moved to West Windsor from Cherry Hill in 2004.
Epstein, once the starting goalkeeper on the Princeton women’s soccer team, played soccer in West Windsor-Plainsboro’s adult pickup league for several years. She has volunteered on the PTOs of Maurice Hawk and Millstone River schools and has led girl scout troops.
Five years ago Epstein re-started the Princeton Area Alumni Association (PA3), a regional group associated with Princeton University that plans events and other activities for area alumni.
While the Epsteins had learned early on about the benefits of exposing children to a second language and always knew they wanted their kids to speak another language, they had initially focused on French because John’s sister lived in France. They hired a French-speaking babysitter, but the language didn’t stick.
Their focus changed to Chinese when they learned about a group trying to start a Mandarin charter school in West Windsor — the Princeton International Academy Charter School — and attended an open house at Plainsboro Library. There they met Bonnie Liao, the founder of PIACS and also the founding director of YingHua. The Epsteins were immediately impressed by Liao’s background and her data on the benefits of early language immersion.
Epstein volunteered as a PIACS board member, confident from the experience she gained as PA3 president. “I was literally on the school board of a charter school that didn’t exist yet,” she says. There was a lot of resistance from school boards. The school ultimately failed to gain the necessary approvals, but Epstein became intrigued by the idea.
“At that time,” Epstein says, “I was not even aware of [YingHua] and not interested in private school in general. With the wonderful reputation of WW-P schools and the property taxes we pay, why would we consider private school? Well, it turns out that [YingHua] truly offers something that the public schools do not at this time.”
Last year she enrolled the younger of her two daughters in YingHua — her 10-year-old daughter was too old to attend. Her reasoning: she would learn all the same things she would in a public school setting, but would also pick up a new language at a young enough age that a foreign language can be absorbed as easily as English.
Bonnie Liao was familiar with Epstein’s reputation and asked her to become director of development, where she worked on marketing and fundraising. At the same time the school’s former executive director, Natalie Ye, wanted to step back into a part-time role. Epstein was appointed full-time executive director to fill the gap.
Epstein says the role didn’t require much cultural adjustment. Her day-to-day duties involve general management, administrative duties (policies, billing, contracts), and policy, not the academic duties of a principal. She has no problems communicating with staff members, who are bilingual in English. While Epstein has been taking Mandarin classes for two years, she notes that the language’s five inflections are very difficult for an adult learner to distinguish. “Now that I am at the school during the day, I am getting better at recognizing phrases,” she says. “I enjoy reading and writing the characters very much. The characters are a combination of puzzle and art.”
The school currently has students from three years old to third grade. Epstein will help manage YingHua’s planned expansion through sixth grade, as well as increasing enrollment in general. The 2013-’14 school year will be the first in which third grade is offered, and one grade level will be added each year. By 2016-’17 the school will offer pre-school through grade six.
For Epstein, most of the adjustment comes from moving from a large, well-funded, and relatively prestigious public school system to a small, privately funded school.
Like many small private schools, YingHua has fewer resources but more flexibility than its larger, publicly funded counterparts. For example, Epstein says, “in West Windsor my daughter plays in the orchestra. You can’t really have an orchestra here.” YingHua can teach music or let students play sports but simply does not have enough students for larger team programs. Her older daughter is at Millstone River, which has around 750 fourth and fifth grade students. YingHua enrolls 50.
When something isn’t working, however, or the teachers want to change course, there is little red tape. When something works better than expected, they can double down.
At the pre-K and kindergarten levels, all instruction is in Mandarin. Starting in first grade, English class accounts for about 15 percent of the curriculum. By sixth grade, classes will be 50 percent in English and 50 percent in Mandarin.
The school program is run on an inquiry-based curriculum, in which the students follow a new theme each semester. Last fall, the theme was “folk tales.” Students read material, completed projects, and played games related to folk tales from different cultures, with a heavy emphasis on Native Americans.
Then a month was added to the curriculum unit for the kids to study their own individual heritage. “We really make a point to not do only Chinese culture,” says Epstein. All the teachers are from China, but only 30 to 40 percent of the students speak Mandarin at home.
“A lot of people found us on the Internet, or through word of mouth,” Epstein explains. “Others just happen to see or hear about the school, usually through the annual Communiversity fair on Nassau Street in Princeton.”
“We are one of the few cultures or countries that doesn’t do this regularly,” Epstein says. If you go to Europe, kids speak multiple languages — as do some of the parents who send their kids to YingHua. Parents of kids from India sometimes spoke one dialect before school, Hindi in elementary school, and English in high school to prepare for college. In Iran, a parent of another YingHua student told her, it was normal for children to learn in French in school and speak Farsi at home. For them, it is a continuation of the norm.
Most of the local Mandarin-speaking population, Epstein says, are first-generation immigrants. They usually bring their children to YingHua because it uses the Chinese national math curriculum on top of state educational standards. They worry, though, about assimilation — that their children will not become Americanized enough. “The Chinese families are actually nervous that their children won’t learn English well enough,” Epstein says.
“The people who speak English at home are less worried about that,” she adds. “It’s almost easier to sell it to them.”
A lot of native Mandarin-speaking parents in the WW-P school system, says Epstein, take their children on Sundays to the Huaxia School in Plainsboro, where they take Chinese language and cultural classes. A lot of the kids, though, grow up able to speak Chinese but unable to read or write in the language, she says.
Epstein says her eight-year-old daughter, who started at the school last year as a second grader, seems to speak fluently in Mandarin with her teachers. But she expresses herself in English differently from her big sister or most other second-graders.
“She almost expresses herself poetically,” Epstein says.
Nonetheless, students from YingHua who have moved on to public or other private schools have not struggled with the change. “All have done quite well with the transition and have exhibited no delays in English,” Epstein says. “It has been proven by numerous studies that students learning in a second language actually do better on English test scores than those who learn only in English.”
Adds Epstein: “Our students follow the same NJ Core Curriculum Standards that all New Jersey public schools follow, just in Mandarin. The concepts and facts they are learning are the same in any language.”
On the flip side, however, the benefits of Chinese language immersion dissipate quickly upon transitioning to a regular school. “We have seen that students who are no longer in our Chinese immersion environment quickly lose their ability to speak, read, and write Chinese,” Epstein says. “It’s amazing to see how fast a child can understand and speak a language in an immersion program. It’s also surprising to witness how fast the same child can lose it.”
Therefore, Epstein explains, keeping children in the immersion setting until they have become independent readers is critical. “One year at the elementary grade level is qualitatively different than a year at, say, the pre-K level,” she explains, because a child who has learned to read and write in a new language will be better motivated and equipped to maintain those language skills.
In the WW-P district, Epstein notes, Chinese is introduced in fourth grade, and while the instruction is high quality, it cannot compete with the immersion model in terms of helping students achieve fluency. “It is a typical pull-out language class,” she says. “Therefore, they learn Chinese vocabulary, writing, et cetera in the class. They do not use Chinese to learn other content. The depth and fluency with the language is just not there as they cannot possibly be exposed to as many words and concepts in Chinese.”
“I believe that WW-P does a good job with the model that they are using; they add many opportunities for additional enrichment,” Epstein adds. “It’s just that model doesn’t work as well as the immersion model. It doesn’t support the other brain development opportunities, either, such as being a more flexible problem solver when learning other content through a second language.”
Epstein adds, however, that incorporating an immersion program into public schools is not outside the realm of possibility. “It is relatively simple to start an immersion program in an existing school system, and I will do my best to encourage WWP to adopt such a program for the benefit of future students,” she says. “There are successful Chinese immersion programs in public schools in Minnesota, Utah, Massaschusetts, and more every year. New Jersey needs to keep up.”
When Epstein first enrolled her daughter in YingHua, she thought it would be “really cool” that she would be learning a second language. As an unintended benefit, she says she believes her child will also have a leg up when she joins the working world some years down the road.
“A lot of people say it’s the language of the future,” says Epstein of Mandarin. “It isn’t the future. It’s really right now. What I found is that employers not only need somebody who can speak another language. They need somebody who can do a technical field in another language. Like, if you can be an engineer and speak Chinese, but have the American sensibilities and be culturally sensitive to the Chinese. Those are the people they really need.”
