Last year, the Santa Clarita Valley Chinese School opened its doors with 20 students, the majority from Chinese families who wanted their kids to formally learn their native language.

Word soon spread about the unique school, and parents lined up to sign their kids up for the classes at a Valencia tutor center.

A few weeks later, 40 kids were enrolled. By March, the school passed the 150-student mark.

And a year later, the SCV Chinese School counts about 200 students as it has expanded its courses and formed partnerships with two local charter schools.

“People realized the importance of this language,” Principal and Executive Director Jinghong Li said.

More classes, demand
The school, which offers classes for students of all ages on Sundays, eventually outgrew its rented space in Valencia and moved to the Santa Clarita Valley International Charter School in Castaic.

The school kicked off the fall semester with 11 classes.

Eventually, school leaders want to give the community more exposure to the Chinese culture. Earlier in the year, the school helped the Santa Clarita City Council declare the first SCV Chinese Culture Day.

“We want to grow in the right way and the right pace,” Li said.

Li hopes to one day offer a student exchange program for students to go to China, much like the program at Saugus High School.

“There’s just so many things we can do,” Li said.

New partnerships
Along with offering its own classes, the SCV Chinese School is working with the SCV International Charter School and the newly opened Albert Einstein Academy for Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“We want to be able to support any school that wants to offer our classes,” Li said.

The SCV International School formed a partnership with the school last year as charter school students could take classes through the SCV Chinese School at a discounted cost, said Amber Golden Raskin, executive director of business development and operations.

Starting next week, students will be able to take Chinese as an option.

“It provides our students an opportunity to add to their portfolio of leadership, Raskin said. “Just learning any other language is really critical to being competitive globally.”

The Einstein Academy, the Santa Clarita Valley’s newest charter school, hopes to add Chinese language classes for students in the next year, executive director Mark Blazer said.

Chinese would be one of the languages students could take as part of their four-year language requirement, he said.

Offering Chinese is part of the academy’s goal of exposing kids to as many languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish to “prepare students for a global economy,” Blazer said.