Newtown School Officials

Travel To China

By Eliza Hallabeck

Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson, Newtown High School Principal Charles Dumais, and Newtown High School Assistant Principal Jason Hiruo traveled to Shanghai, China, this week to visit Jincai Experimental School.

The three administrators will return from their trip on Saturday, December 3. They posted photos to Mr Dumais’s blog, dumais.us/newtown/blog, this week during the trip.

As Dr Robinson announced at a Board of Education meeting on October 18, the trip was made to further solidify the relationship between the Newtown Public School district and Jincai Experimental School.

Also during the October meeting, Mr Hiruo presented information on the district’s Newtown International Center for Education (NICE) program, which has grown since preliminary visits by Dr Robinson, Mr Hiruo, and others to Liaocheng, in the Shandong province of China, in 2008. Previously called Newtown’s China Initiative, NICE now includes a growing relationship with schools in Japan.

NICE, Mr Hiruo said at the meeting, is supported by an annual grant through the Hanban-Confucious Classroom Network and the College Board.

This week, Mr Hiruo said the current trip to China was also funded through a grant from the Hanban-Confucious Classroom Network.

The sister school relationship between Newtown and Shanghai, according to NICE’s website, was last pursued in April 2011, when Mr Hiruo met with Principal Yang Long of Jincai Experimental School.

“This is an exceptional school,” said Mr Hiruo this week from China via e-mail about the Jincai Experimental School, “for not only professional reasons of our classroom teachers, but as one of the top schools in the city, we are currently working on building online collaboration for our elementary schools so that our students have the opportunity to develop and deepen understandings of culture firsthand in the classroom.”

Mr Hiruo further explained the Jincai Experimental School is a progressive school with practices that will make it less complicated to implement collaboration between the school and Newtown’s elementary schools. He also said the teachers at the Jincai Experimental School are “anxious to include language components in their collaboration with the student learning experience online between the two countries.”

Another aspect of NICE that is growing, Mr Hiruo said, is a parent organization. He said that part of the NICE website is still evolving, and the group taking shape will help provide opportunities for fundraising, event, and activity planning, and a professional resource group for the district.

“The program’s success,” Mr Hiruo said, “is due to the fact that any educator traveling to China has paid their own way, and in this case, was funded by Hanban. We have not used any taxpayer money for any program pieces such as this. The success of this program comes specifically from the investment of the educators.”

While visiting sister schools, Mr Hiruo said accommodations are provided by the schools, like when visitors from those schools travel to Newtown.

A delegation from Liaocheng is scheduled to visit Newtown between the end of January and the start of February. To provide accommodations to the visiting group, which will include students, teachers, and administrators, NICE asked for host families to volunteer from around Newtown.

Mr Hiruo said anyone looking for more information about NICE or NICE initiatives can visit the NICE website, located off of the school’s district’s website, www.newtown.k12.ct.us, by clicking on the “NICE” box. He also said contact information for NICE team members is available on the website.