Daviess County Public Schools has decided to cancel its contract with Western Kentucky University’s Confucius Institute, which provided Chinese teacher to Apollo High School and Burns Middle School.
DCPS Superintendent Matt Robbins announced the change at the last Daviess County Board of Education meeting.
Without Chinese, the only foreign language option left at Burns will be Spanish. Robbins said the $18,000 DCPS contribution for the two Confucius Institute teachers is now be allocated to Apollo and Burns for French teachers. Apollo just hired a French teacher to start in the fall 2019 school year.
In late April, Owensboro Times spoke to DCPS Director of Secondary Schools Charles Broughton, who was hopeful that an agreement could be reached to allow the language program to continue. Robbins said because of timing and planning, he decided to cancel the contract.
Last year, WKU provided Chinese language and culture instruction to 47 K-12 schools in more than 20 school districts in Kentucky using teachers recruited from China, according to an April news release.
The two Chinese teachers in the DCPS district served 80 – 100 students each at their respective schools.
According to WKU’s release, the decision to close the Confucius Institute, which has operated at WKU since 2010, came when the university could not secure a waiver from the Department of Defense (DOD) that would allow WKU to operate both the Confucius Institute and its Chinese Flagship Program. Defense spending legislation passed in 2018 prohibits institutions from hosting Confucius Institutes if they receive DOD funding for Chinese language programs, the release said.
Owensboro Times reached WKU Media Relations Director Bob Skipper who said the university continues to explore ways to maintain outreach to the K-12 schools.
“We are looking at possible agreements with Chinese institutions to continue to bring teachers to Kentucky and the feasibility of combining the Chinese program into a larger program to include other languages, such as Arabic and Spanish,” he said. “We hope one of these options, or some combination, will enable us to continue to help the school districts in our service region meet the needs of their students.”
