Chinese will not be offered as a language course in the 2026-2027 school year.
For the past three years ever since it was added to IMS, Chinese has been a favorite subject among students who took it. Maraiz Rangari, an eighth grader currently enrolled in Chinese, said it’s very fun and he “learned a lot.”
A lot of people say that what makes Chinese class so fun and interesting is the teacher Andrew Cahill. Cahill is the Chinese teacher at Iselin Middle School(IMS); he also teaches at John F. Kennedy(JFK).
At JFK, where Cahill also works as a Chinese teacher, there will be additional classes for Chinese next year. This means that Cahill will have to teach more classes there, and that will deter him from teaching Chinese classes at Iselin Middle School.
According to Cahill, “Teachers are only allowed to teach a certain number of classes, so that they won’t get overworked.”
Cahill can not teach both the additional Chinese classes at JFK and the regular Chinese classes at IMS without violating the rule, so he ultimately can not teach Chinese at Iselin Middle School. Though, that is not the real reason why Chinese is going to be removed.
On May 12, students in the seventh and sixth grade filled out a form that contained all the electives that will be offered in the next school year. All of the students that filled out the form saw that Chinese was not displayed as an option in the World Languages section of the form, which means that Chinese has officially been removed from the World Languages courses for the next school year and possibly for the years to come.
“I think they don’t want to hire another Chinese teacher,” Cahill said.
Cahill’s forced departure means that the school has to hire another Chinese teacher, so that Chinese can still be offered as a language course. Since Chinese is a hard language, there are few people with qualifications for teaching Chinese. Thus, Cahill suggested that they should try to find and hire more Chinese teachers and if not, then they should hire a person who is actually Chinese to teach.
Cahill feels upset and even guilty because of the consequences this new removal will have on his current students.
“I think it’s sad for the people that thought they would be able to take Chinese for 2 years with me. It’s sort of a false promise,” Cahill said.
Cahill feels especially worried about his seventh grade students being placed into a different language course.
“The students in my seventh grade class taking Chinese will be in an intermediate Spanish class or intermediate French class, so they’re going to be behind. That’s going to be sad,” Cahill said.
The seventh grade students in Cahill’s class feel the same way as Cahill about being placed in a different level and language class.
“It will probably be tough because we’ll have to be able to review stuff we didn’t learn this year but still have to learn it,” seventh grader Jackson Reed said.
Reed also feels that “it’s weird because they gave [Chinese] to us this year, but we’re not able to continue [Chinese] next year.”
Chinese not being offered in the curriculum isn’t new. Before the 2023-2024 school year, Chinese wasn’t offered at all. It was only until Cahill became the Chinese teacher starting in the 2023-2024 school year that people could actually take Chinese.
As of now, there hasn’t been any update on whether the school has hired a new Chinese teacher. It is most likely that Chinese will continue to be removed for the following years until the school is able to find another Chinese teacher like the situation with Cahill three years ago.
