1/ Thanks to @annaprytz at @theage for covering this story.

Very disingenuous for Footscray Primary School to say that finding Vietnamese teachers was the key issue in shutting down the bilingual program https://twitter.com/annaprytz/status/1317962582242643968

2/ The reality is that FPS couldn’t retain the Vietnamese bilingual teachers they had. They hired 8 teachers and lost 8 since 2016. Chau Cong, a former coordinator of the program, said on a podcast recently that the teachers left because they were undermined and undervalued

3/ finding bilingual teachers is not a challenge unique to Vietnamese or insurmountable. The school has done the bare minimum on this front. They haven’t reached out to the Viet Community of Australia or the head of the Vietnamese Teachers Association about recruitment issues

4/ The school hasn’t sought out teachers from the international community in Vietnam or the US.

5/ the school set up the program to fail in recent years by not implementing best practices like ensuring 50% of the time spent in Vietnamese or starting the program from prep (for some unknown reason FPS starts at grade 2)

6/ Nor have they made an effort to understand best practice by reaching out to successful Vietnamese bilingual schools in the US prior to deciding to axe it

7/ The program was slowly suffocated by the willful neglect and the soft racism of doing the bare minimum by the school administrators towards languages not valued by upper middle class white parents