Following the departure of Upper School Mandarin teacher Cheyanne Yao last year, many students expected to welcome a new teacher into the Poly’s Mandarin program this year. However, after interviewing potential candidates, Poly opted against hiring a new Mandarin teacher.

In the past three years, Poly has seen three separate part-time Mandarin teachers. Upper School Director José Melgoza stated, “It’s always a mixture of looking at how many teachers we have [at Poly] and how many students are registering for different courses and deciding what sort of staffing we require.” Keeping that in mind, he stated, “It was a pretty straightforward decision. It was just that we could internally cover the courses.”

For the 2025-2026 school year, the Poly Mandarin Program consists of two teachers, Upper School World Languages Teacher Lois Chung and Middle and Upper School World Languages Teacher Mimi Chiu. Previously, Chiu had only taught at the middle school; however, Poly made the decision to have her fill the vacancy at the upper school.

Chung, head of the Mandarin program at Poly, was not involved in the decision, but she shared her concern about its impact.

“The Mandarin program needs a full-time teacher, because we are a program that grows drastically every year.” she explains.“Having a full-time teacher will be a stable and sustainable way as it is hard to keep a part-time teacher because of our six-day rotation,” she added. The rotation schedule causes class periods to be at a different time each day, making it difficult for a part-time teacher to maintain work outside of Poly.

We’ll see how the program fares this year, which may influence Poly’s staffing choices for the next academic year.