About 25 people attended a meeting at Maples Collegiate Tuesday evening to discuss a proposal for a kindergarten to grade 3 Filipino bilingual program within Seven Oaks School Division.
The meeting was hosted by the Seven Oaks Filipino Employee Association.
Organizer Cory Juan, a former teacher and former school trustee, said her hope is to see the program up and running by the start of the next school year.
The division has after school programming in Tagalog and several other languages, but a bilingual program doesn’t exist.
Juan said if implemented it would be the first of its kind in the city and would run out of one school, but she doesn’t know which school.
“The instruction would be 40 per cent in Filipino and 60 per cent in English,” said Juan.
Seven Oaks superintendent Brian O’Leary said the division explored starting a Filipino bilingual program in 2016 but there wasn’t enough interest at the time.
He said the group will have to demonstrate enough parents would enroll their children in the program before the school board can hear any kind of proposal.
Juan said there was confusion among parents about how it would work the first time the program was looked at. She said there’s more interest this time around.
Juan said so far, about 20 families have expressed interest.
Gerard Madarang and his family immigrated to Winnipeg from the Philippines 14 months ago.
He would like to see the program made available to his three daughters, ages 4, 6 and 8, so they can keep a close connection to their culture and language.
“I think it will be for their advantage for them still to have their identity back home when they visit the Philippines,” said Madarang. “It will be to their advantage in the future because I know the Filipino community is growing.”
About 130 students from kindergarten to grade 6 are enrolled in a Ukrainian bilingual program and 76 students from kindergarten to grade 4 are enrolled in an Ojibwe bilingual program which will be expanded next year to grade 5.
