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Date: 9/12/2023
HADLEY — The number 2 ranked high school in Massachusetts is one many may not be very familiar with, according to US News and World Report.
The Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School was listed second in the report’s findings, the K-12 public charter school is now in their 17th year of operation.
The school enrollment of approximately 560 students come from all over the Pioneer Valley and gain entrance via a lottery system said Principal Kathleen Wang.
“We were happy to see it [the ranking], we’re proud of the ranking but I would say that’s one metric that I think defines our success, I’m most proud of teachers and the students,” Wang said.
The Boston Latin School ranked number one in the state.
Chicopee’s Hampden Charter School of Science was the next western Massachusetts high school to rank in the report, listed at number 34 in the state.
According to the reports methodology, the schools are ranked on category-based percentages including college readiness, performance and proficiency in state assessments, underserved student performance and graduation rates.
Wang said part of the design of the program was to be able to give opportunity to kids in many different towns.
“It’s a very diverse student population,“ Wang said. “We have a service area that is as far north as Greenfield and as far south as Springfield.”
Wang has been with the school since it began in 2007 in a strip mall with an enrollment of 40 students.
“Seventeen years later we now have a building that looks more like a school, so I also credit again the teachers but also the parent community because they didn’t judge us by the strip mall or that we didn’t have this fancy building.” Wang said.
Wang said they still don’t have a fancy building compared to some school districts but that’s not the priority.
“It’s more about the people and what goes on inside the building than the building itself,” she said.
The school building now is a former health club and children’s play space and has undergone at least 15 renovations over the years as school administrators tried to regulate the institution’s growth.
“Our plan was to phase the growth over a 10-year period because we didn’t want to sacrifice quality for quantity so we really grew slowly compared to some charters,” she said.
Wang calls the student population very diverse and representative of many different cultures and backgrounds as well as languages with a program that was unavailable 20 years ago when the concept for the school was introduced.
“There were very few programs that offered a world language, immersion and fewer, even none doing Chinese in Massachusetts,” she said.
Wang, who is of Chinese descent said in some sense there was a motivation of being a heritage speaker and feeling the importance of creating such a program.
“This country has always talked about, there’s been many white papers talking about educational competitiveness and what is needed to prepare students for the 21st century or for skills or for the global economy or just being a global citizen and many of those white papers have been published but there are very few actual implementations of schools to do that,” she said. “It’s easy to say we need things, it’s not always easy to implement them.”
Wang made note that a community in rural Franklin County is very different from a more urban or even suburban community in Hampshire or Hampden County.
“I appreciate being in the Pioneer Valley and there’s many cultures here and one goal of the school is to support all students and we literally have students from many different towns and communities, cultural, racial ethnic and linguistic family backgrounds, gender backgrounds and everything, that is part of the mission of the school,” she said. “If you can go through our program and learn two languages that opens up the idea that there’s other cultures and then you are therefore more open to multiple cultures and you see the world in another way.”