Thursday, November 15, 2007
Southern Indiana Japanese School honored
|
Japan Overseas Educational Services, a subsidiary of the Japanese government’s Ministry of Education and Science, has awarded USI’s Southern Indiana Japanese School (SIJS) with its School Award for the second year in a row. Keietsu Nishimura, principal of SIJS, said that every student in the school’s first through ninth grades entered the award contest in each area, including composition, poetry, haiku, and tanka (a traditional Japanese poem that is longer than a haiku). There are more than 50,000 Japanese students studying abroad at 300 Japanese schools around the world, Nishimura said, and the School Award is given to only 16 of them. Sixty students ranging in age from 7 to 18 years old attend SIJS on 48 Saturdays a year. Students come from the Tri-state region and as far as Vincennes, Indiana, and Owensboro, Kentucky, to take classes at the school, which is located at Nativity Church on Pollack Avenue. Nishimura said, “Since we started to participate in this contest in 1998, only our school and the Chicago Japanese School were given this award in the Midwest, including schools from Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri. We are very proud of this.” USI opened the school in September 1997 at the request of Japanese companies locating in southwestern Indiana. SIJS enables students to smoothly integrate back into Japanese schools when their families return to Japan, usually within three to five years. Before joining USI, Nishimura worked at the Japanese School in Indianapolis for seven years and was a high school teacher in Japan. For more information about the school, click here. Wendy Knipe Bredhold USI News and Information Services wkbredhold@usi.edu 812/461-5259 |
Copyright © 2013 University of Southern Indiana. All rights reserved.