In mid-November, following the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election, elementary students at the Seigakuin Atlanta International School were surprised by the concerns of their counterparts in a Mexican elementary school with whom they were having a Skype visit.
“Would we be safe?” was the question on the Mexican children’s minds should they visit the United States, according to Minako Ahearn, principal and managing director of the board of the Japanese-English “two-way immersion school.”
“They seemed very worried,” she told Global Atlanta during a visit to the school where students learn both Japanese and English. But she was relieved by the answers that they received. “Why, you’d be just like us,” is the way she recalled that the Atlanta children responded. Much to the relief of the Mexican kids, she added.
Mrs. Ahearn has headed the school since 1998, and is in the process of gathering support for a charter school certified by the State Charter School Commission. Her goal is to interest parents of children from across Georgia to enroll their children who would receive a high level of instruction in the normal liberal arts and science curriculums and learn a foreign language as well. While only English and Japanese are in the curriculum today, she anticipates adding Chinese in the near future.
During an interview in her office with letters of support from former President Carter, Gov. Nathan Deal and Georgia’s U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson posted behind her, she outlined her plans to start a state supported school that children could attend free if charge.
“I want to open up this unique education to all children in Georgia,” she said. “Tuition at private schools is going up to $16,000 to $20,000 per child. We are not there yet, but we will have to do that too in the very near future. In that case it would be a school for only a very wealthy group of people. I want to offer this education to people of all income levels.”
The Seigakuin school (also known as SAINTS) first opened in September 1990 on the campus of Oglethorpe University where it resided for a dozen years before moving into its spanking clean and brightly decorated buildings on Winters Chapel Road in Gwinnett County, which formerly belonged to a Romanian Baptist church.
When the school was founded, it opened with 23 students, including 16 kindergarteners and seven in the first through fourth grades, most of whom were all Japanese.
Their parents generally worked for Japanese companies and usually were posted in Atlanta for only three or four years. Their main concern was to provide their children with an adequate educational background so they could readily be assimilated into the Japanese school systems upon their return.
As a Seigakuin school, the elementary school here is affiliated with Seigakuin University, a private institution in Ageo, Saitama, Japan,that anchors a network of kindergarten, primary, and junior and senior high schools throughout Japan, which all are infused with the Protestant ideals of the university’s founding missionaries. Both the university and the schools’ motto is “Love God and Serve His People.”
The elementary school also has received accreditation from Japan’s Ministry of Education in recognition of its educational standards. Mrs. Ahearn is adamant about the quality of education the students receive at the school even though its curriculum has changed over the years.
Ninety to 100 students currently are enrolled in the school allowing for classrooms with no more than 14 students in a class.
In the past most all of the students were Japanese but now only half of them are from homes where Japanese is the native language. The remainder are mostly from American, English-speaking homes, but there also are students from the homes of Bulgarian, Brazilian, Chinese, Colombian, Korean, Mexican and Nigerian parents.
“Some of the students from the American homes have no experience in Japan at all while others have spent some time in Japan,” Mrs. Ahearn said. “But they all have heard that the instruction is good and of a high level. They trust us.”
They also know, she said, that it’s best to start learning a foreign language at an early age, and that Japanese is recognized as an important and useful language, she added.
With the goal of becoming “a dual language immersion” school, it switched its curriculum in 2004. “We know that there is a lot of cooperation between Georgia and Japan and that they are true partners,” Mrs. Ahearn said.
According to the Consulate General of Japan in Atlanta, Georgia is regarded as the center of Japanese industry in the Southeast and that Japanese-affiliated companies have invested as much as $10.4 billion in the state where 547 Japanese-affiliated companies currently operate.
Mrs. Ahearn already held her first town hall meeting to publicize a new Japanese/English Dual Language program and is planning for more town hall meetings to take place over the course of next year with the goal of launching the charter school in 2018.
Her pitch at the town hall meetings is that “In our increasingly globalized world, multilingualism and multiculturalism are a must for success in any field.”
This message must draw support from families throughout the state willing to have their children experience the intensive language immersion for it to qualify as a charter school. “We can’t become a charter school with only a small number of students,” she said, projecting that the enrollment would grow to at least 240 students by 2020.
“We have at least 12 years of experience and 12 years of developing the dual immersion program,” she said. “No other charter school has such a depth of experience and such a developed program with such high quality teachers already in place.”
Both private and public schools in Georgia have accepted students who have passed through the Seigakuin program including the Atlanta International School, Galloway, Greater Atlanta Christian, Lovett, Marist, Mt. Pisgah Christian, Notre Dame, Wesleyan, Westminster, and Woodward. Older graduates have been accepted into many colleges and graduate schools including American University, Auburn, Carnegie Mellon University, Case Western Reserve University and many others.
“Perhaps it’s because I was at Seigakuin for nine years, but my classmates and I were like siblings,” recalls Megumi Shimamura, a research graduate assistant and master’s of business administration recipient at Kennesaw State University.
“Since the student-to-teacher ratio was low, we also had close relationships with our teachers. Even when I started going to American public schools, because of my experiences at Seigakuin, I was able to maintain my Japanese language ability and earn a perfect score on the level N-1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Additionally, it was my bilingualism in Japanese that got me my current job. Seigakuin not only gave me precious memories, but also something I can use in real life.”
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