Mandarin Immersion Magnet School

This school is only 4 years old and already is leap frogging it's way to be one of the highest scoring and ranking schools in the district. Now that all the grades have been filled out and it's 100% MIMS only students, I believe it had the 3rd highest test scores this year in the district and is now very difficult to get into. My daughter enrolled when the school first opened and like most parents who entered the first year we knew we were going to be in for a bumpy ride until the school becomes more established. Some bumps are ongoing but most parents I talk to are happy. The admin is very responsive to parent feedback and the PTO is very active creating benefits that most schools don't have until they're much older. Ie, every morning before school starts the principle gives a lesson about a Chinese idiom or traits that our students should strive for. Ie Courage, Compassion etc. to go along with their character building curriculum at school. It actually works because my kid will talk about how she witnessed or did something that fit a trait taught at school. As for fluency, if your child has no Chinese speaking ability don't expect your child to be fluent after a few months. Some parents left because they thought their kids would be fluent after a yr and be speaking to their friends in Chinese which is completely unrealistic. I already knew that going in and have been happy with the results so far, especially since my child couldn't speak a single word of Chinese. Now she can hold simple conversations in Mandarin with zero accent. When she overhears native Chinese speakers having a conversation she'll eavesdrop and tell me that while she can't understand everything she does understand the gist of their conversation and understands a lot more than what she can say. Often the MIMS students win and place at local Chinese speaking contests and always rank in NTB and UIL. The students that come here are very bright. MIMS is #1 for diversity in TX though I've noticed a lot more native Chinese kids are enrolling lately. I've spoken to their parents and found out they enrolled because their kids were refusing to speak English at home and forgetting their Chinese. After MIMS, the kids don't resist and their Chinese greatly improves. MIMS also promotes entrepreneurship and programming and hold a kids marketplace where kids set up stores to buy/sell/advertise/hire/learn how businesses work, etc..