The Appleton Area School District (AASD) will open a charter school focused on Hmong language and culture in the fall of 2025, the district announced Tuesday.
District officials said they hope the Hmong American Immersion School (HAIS, pronounced “hi”) will serve about 150 students in 4k through fifth grade.
MaiKou Heu, the principal at Appleton’s Johnston Elementary School, was one of the leaders of the effort to establish a Hmong-focused charter school. Heu is herself a product of the Appletons school system, immigrating to the area with her parents when she was just a year old.
“Growing up in the Fox Cities here, I experienced a cultural clash,” she told Madison365 in an interview. “I’m trying to understand the Western culture, while blending into my own culture and identity. What I find now with my students and with my own children, is that they lost the language and the cultural identity piece. They have assimilated so well into our Western culture, that they no longer know what it means to be Hmong.”
She said there can be a disconnect even within families if children only speak English and their parents or grandparents only speak Hmong.
“Our hope with HAIS is to allow students to learn about the Hmong language, how to read and write it, and also to learn about Hmong cultural heritage and fold that into our current curriculum,” Heu said.
AASD is already home to 13 charter schools with several different focuses, such as arts or engineering. A 14th focused on African culture will open this fall.
“We’re really excited about adding this 15th charter school to our district,” Superintendent Greg Harjes said.
Heu joined other advocates for the school in approaching Hartjes about the school in late 2022. In early 2023 the district put the project on hold for a year until grant dollars would become available from the state Department of Instruction. They applied for a grant earlier this year and learned last month that DPI would provide $1.5 million to get the school up and running.
Heu said the first step will be to hire an “impact director” to begin organizing the school, studying community needs and recruiting students. Hartjes said the school will be housed within an existing elementary school building and the staff will primarily consist of current AASD staff.
Hartjes said the $1.5 million will allow the school to get up and running and operate for four years, after which time it will be operated by AASD.
The school will be open to all AASD students, who will apply for a lottery system for admission, just as is the case with all other charter schools. Students from neighboring school districts will also be able to attend, but they’ll have to apply for open enrollment with the state.
The four counties surrounding Appleton — Outagamie, Winnebago, Calumet and Brown – are home to about 13,000 Hmong people, according to state data. The state of Wisconsin has the third largest Hmong population in the United States, behind only Minnesota and California.
