After what will have been a decade of operation, BSM’s Chinese department will no longer be offering classes beginning the fall of 2023.

Chinese classes will cease to be taught at BSM due to the lack of enrollment. Many students tend to gravitate towards languages that they’re familiar with, such as Spanish or French, that had been taught to them in their previous years of schooling. “…when it came time to register [for classes], students just wanted to register for [languages] they already knew, which is Spanish, since all of our feeder schools – Catholic ones – aren’t offering Chinese,” Senior High Principal Stephanie Nitchals said.

The difficulty of the Chinese language also pertains to the lack of students currently enrolled in classes. Chinese is not a phonetic language, which means that it requires a separate alphabet since the language’s written form does not equal its spoken form. Chinese’s intricacy makes it harder for new students to try a new language. “So ninth graders are just very reluctant,” Nitchals said.

Because the last Chinese classes offered will be in the spring of 2023, this means that current sophomores enrolled in Chinese will be without a language class their senior year. Since their senior year is a couple of years out, sophomores in Chinese generally don’t have a concrete plan for what their senior year of high school will look like. “I gotta talk to my counselor,” sophomore Ben Rodine, a current Chinese language student, said.

However, in the case that a student was enrolled in a Chinese immersion program or had been taking the language for multiple years, there is a possibility that said student could be enrolled in an online Chinese program. This opportunity would not be offered for students new to the language. “If it was a ninth grader coming in, we would just ask them to choose a different language,” Nitchals said.

Originally, BSM’s Chinese department was created to keep up with the modernizing trends regarding globalization and the increasing connections across the world. Without Chinese classes available to students, there is a smaller opportunity for students to learn about new cultures. “I think with globalization nowadays, it’s really important to…learn another language or culture to know about the culture,” former Chinese teacher Jiali Zhao said.

Though both the Chinese language students and teachers are aware of BSM’s Chinese classes coming to an end, this is not stopping the passion students and teachers have for the culture. “We are still passionate about teaching…the language, the culture, and talking about different perspectives,” Zhao said.