From The Principal	

By Dr. T. Leo Lo
Principal, St. Louis Chinese Language School

The Chinese slang "Second Spring" usually means a new beginning with hope after a period of idleness or downturn. When I came out from my retirement of Principal two years ago, I did not have that "Second Spring" feeling mainly because I was planning to strengthen our system and processes for the younger generation to lead our school. Two years have passed much sooner than I expect, and I am glad that we had entered the new century without too many catastrophic excitements.   

When I first took over the Principal position, I divided the Academic Program into three branches (Traditional, simplified and English) and the Enrichment Program into two with the intent to off-load Program Director's workload. I am grateful that Violet Li, Lu Chen and Lanny Chong each took the responsibilities of their assignments and has done an excellent job to manage our academic programs. Ying Li and Harry Chu each took care of the enrichment programs to make them as smooth as possible. Special thanks are extended to Dr. Jinbin Mai for taking over Lanny's responsibility during her leave of absence period.

Our school operations could not have done this smoothly without the supports of our behind-the-scene staff members. My special thanks go to Duncan Cheung, our Treasurer, for squeezing out time from his already extremely busy schedule to take care of the tedious accounting; to Sophia Liu who has served various staff positions in the past for coming out from retirement to take care of Secretarial responsibilities (e.g., cleaning the storage room, take care of copying machines to make teachers happy, etc.); to  Mingyi Deng, Director of Administration, for handling annual Appreciation Dinner and school opening and closing ceremonies; to Kun Zhang for his superb support on Registration and school web site management; and to Xun Yang for performing tedious school asset inventories (we spent several weekends to finish only the textbook and reference book sections; the enrichment assets are next in-line to be inventoried).

Our Board of Directors under the leadership of Dr. Haiyan Cai is also helping school programs and projects. Mrs. Lian Pan and Jimmy Hsu arranged several special seminars on medical, tax and, pottery for parents; Elaine Tang and Charlie Cheng contacted on-duty parents every week to make sure they report to duty; Annlie Sing organizes the nominations of scholarship and community service awards, invites teachers to prepare qualification testing questions, and sets up schedules. Patricia Ling has spent many hours to reach out many parents and friends for school fund raising project. Dan Ku before his retirement from the Board leads the nomination committee to solicit candidates for the six Board positions; and congratulations to the newly elected Board members!

The school operation has gone through some bumpy road. The West Tech school has been sold and we are looking for a new facility again. The Academic Program is fairly stable and only the English teaching section needs some good teaching material. The Enrichment Programs have teacher shortage on folk dances and arts & crafts. We are grateful that Ying Li has taken care of the folk dance classes and with the addition of Ms. Li He, our folk dance program is finally in a good shape. Arts & crafts program really needs some help. If you know any talent, please recommend to School. There are a few classes with cultural significance (e.g. calligraphy), but were not be able to offer due to lack of interest.

I have done several administrative changes in this school year. First, we changed the registration once for the whole year to simplify the registration processing and offer discount to families taking advantage of the advanced registration. secondly, we established a special pin-yin drill class for those without prior pin-yin training. We only did once and have not assessed the real result. Thirdly, we extended each language period five extra minutes to allow more learning time. So far, we received positive feedbacks from teachers.

I have heard some concerns regarding our School's direction. I just want to re-emphasize that our objectives are to teach Chinese language and promote cultural programs without consideration of race, religion, cultural background and political association. I hope all of you support these objectives and work together to build a better program for our children!