Chinese Immersion School at De Avila
The Chinese Immersion School at De Avila is the latest incarnation of the historic Dudley Stone School, founded in San Francisco, California, in 1896 and surviving the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906. The kindergarten-through-fifth-grade school provides instruction in Chinese. The school today Established in 2009, the Chinese Immersion School at De Avila is the fifth of San Francisco Unified School District’s Chinese-Immersion programs. Classes began on August 24, 2009, with two first-grade and three kindergarten classes. Additional upper grade classes were to be added each year until the school becomes a full kindergarten-to-fifth-grade elementary school. Some 80 percent of the instruction is in Cantonese, and a fifth of the school time is devoted to developing English skills. Beginning in the third grade, the students are introduced to Mandarin. The curriculum includes mathematics, science, history, physical education, art, dance and music. History Dudley Stone School Namesake Dudley Stone School was named after Dudley C. Stone, a science teacher and deputy superintendent of the San Francisco City Schools in the 1870s and early 1880s. He was called "one of the pioneer educators of California." Stone was born in Marietta, Ohio, in 1829 and taught in New Orleans, where he was married in 1849 to Mary Ozier, before moving to Santa Cruz, California, in 1852. He opened a private school in Berkeley in 1868 but then joined the public schools in San Francisco as deputy superintendent in 1876. In an 1879 report, he advocated the establishment of a kindergarten program in San Francisco and, writing in the third person as the deputy school superintendent, he said he was averse to the present system of written and oral examinations being carried to excess and suggests that but two written examinations be allowed each month, requiring not longer than one hour and a half each. . . . He also recommends a few radical changes in the present course of study, more especially in that of oral instruction, in which more prominence should be given to the elements of physiology, natural philosophy, and civil government in the higher grammar grades. . . . He speaks unfavorably of the Laguna Honda School and deems it unwise and injudicious to the authorities to allow children to make their home at the Almshouse and subject them to the miserable influence of its associations. . . . several reforms are suggested in the teaching of geography and grammar, too much attention being paid to unimportant details, and not sufficient drill upon salient and striking points. He contends that there is far too much corporal punishment in the public schools, and suggests that it be entirely abolished. Stone was a science teacher in the district's Powell Street normal school, or teacher-training school. On December 1, 1895, he was struck by a streetcar in Oakland, California, and a coroner's jury determined that he "met his death through his own carelessness" inasmuch as the streetcar conductor testified that he "warned Stone several times against alighting." Stone, 68, was hit by