Dear Parents & Friends:

The fall semester of year 2001 has been in operation for more than two months. The number of enrolled students exceeds 250. The increased enrollment has place tremendous responsibilities on the shoulder of our Board of Directors, school teaching staff and administrative personnel.

The success of the Chinese Language School can be surely attributed to the leadership of our Principle and his experienced management team. However, without the active involvement and continuous support of all the parents and old friends, the Chinese Language School would not stand out as the best Chinese language school in the St. Louis Metropolitan area. In order for us to maintain this outstanding performance and tradition, and to make sure the school can be self-sustainable in all areas such as curriculum, teaching materials, equipment and other teaching aids, we would like to solicit for your enthusiastic endorsement so that the next generation of our children in both learning and understanding the Chinese culture has a solid foundation to build on.

As a non-profit organization, the school needs to continuously build a reserve fund for any emergency needs.  In case the West Tech. decides not to rent their facility to us, increase the rental fee or simply becomes unavailable, our school can only survive for a few years with our current reserve fund. Of course, none of us would want to see this happen. In addition, our school has been in existence for more than twenty-two years and has never had our own buildings. The Future Building Fund is also within our long-range planing project. Therefore, it is so important for us to request your continuous support for the future of our school.

We would like to point out that although our tuition includes textbooks, the cost of providing textbooks has become alarmingly expensive. We have two versions of textbooks, the self-compiled and purchased from external source. The textbooks provided by Taiwan Overseas Commission contain the phonetic symbols that are not used in the U.S. Teachers also need to provide supplement materials each week for those self-compiled textbooks to assist in their teaching. On the self-compiled textbooks, the averaged cost of printing and binding such textbook is about $5. The purchased textbooks including the textbooks and homework set for the simplified character Chinese is $7 per student.  In the enrichment programs, our folk dance and lion dance teams often represent our school by performing outside, not only promoting Chinese culture, but also our school image. They will need new costumes for new dances. Our school tries to operate as much within the tuition income as possible. But the tuition would not be sufficient to cover unplanned expenses such as upgrading/acquiring our computer equipment, purchasing cultural video tapes or CDs, new copying machines, and storage rental for school assets, etc.
 
Due to the fact that our school is recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a 510C(3) non-profit and charitable organization, your generous contribution, regardless the amount, is tax deductible for the year of 2000. If your employer offers donation-matching program, please do take advantage of the offering, so that our school will be benefited with yours and your employer's matching contribution. Your generous contribution, which will encourage us to move up to anther new horizon, would be highly appreciated. Please send your love donation to P. O. Box 410656, St. Louis, MO 63141 payable to St. Louis Chinese Language School.

May you be Healthy, Happy and Productive!

Fund Raising Committee				Chairman, Board of Directors
May Huang & Patricia Ling				Haiyan Cai  


PO Box 410656, St. Louis, MO 63141
Tel: 314-469-3911; E-mail: stlcls@rocketmail.com; web: www.stlcls.org