Global Ambassadors Language Academy (GALA) opened in 2016 as a fledgling language immersion school with 60 kindergarten and first grade students. Since its inception, Ohio's sole dual language charter academy, providing a deep dive into Spanish and Mandarin language and culture, has added a grade each year, culminating in its first eighth-grade graduation in spring 2024.

As a payoff for their hard work, GALA offers graduating Mandarin students a trip to China to test their developing communication skills firsthand.

Recent graduate Nadia McKay's Mandarin Chinese education began in second grade— stemming from a general love of language that included Spanish study at Near West Intergenerational School.

“People typically don’t think a Black girl can speak Chinese fluently,” says McKay. “Whenever I say something in Chinese, it’s like, ‘you didn’t expect that.’”

Nadia McKay, left, and a friend on their trip to ChinaIn 2023, McKay and a fellow student traveled to Chengdu, China—a journey that involved a full day of flights—to compete, in part, in an international debate challenge against both American and Chinese students.

McKay also embarked on an additional three days of cultural sights and sounds that included landmark visits and a trip to a massive outdoor grocery.

“There were so many things there, like candy and bookmarks,” recalls McKay, who is now a freshman at Cleveland School of the Arts. “I remember people taking photos of me and my friend, probably because we were foreigners.”

McKay says she finds her conversational Mandarin skills useful for private complaints about her mother, Yolanda, with her three other siblings who are currently attending GALA.

ALA founder Meran Rogers lsays her academy is built on a foundation of global awareness and cultural empathy.“She always loved learning languages, so we said let’s try GALA,” Yolanda says. “It was another way to get Nadia out of her comfort zone. She learned Spanish at [Near West Intergenerational School], but that’s not a language immersion school.”

All students attending GALA begin speaking Mandarin or Spanish from their first day in school, notes founder and executive director Meran Rogers. Students spend half of each school day learning in their chosen foreign language, though no prior experience is required for kindergarten and first-grade students. Students entering grades two through eight must first pass a language proficiency test.

Even a decade into its existence, some people still struggle to understand GALA's tuition-free nature and commitment to a foreign-language curriculum.

“There are bilingual Spanish schools within the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, but those schools have a test to determine if you’re Spanish-dominant,” explains Rogers, who receives public funding from the Ohio Department of Education. “Our model is additive in assuming kids don’t have that language [skill]. I’ve met parents who didn’t understand that this is a regular school, and not some afterschool program.”

Building a foundation
About three-quarters of GALA’s 300 students hail from City of Cleveland, with the remainder deriving from other parts of Ohio. Operating from the Jefferson neighborhood on Cleveland’s West Side, the academy is built on a foundation of global awareness and cultural empathy—two tenets that Rogers says she did not have upon moving to Cleveland with her family at age three.

With a Polish mother and Taiwanese father, Rogers says she felt that Northeast Ohio, as well as the U.S. in general, lagged significantly behind a world where language proficiency is standard.

A teaching stint at an English immersion school in Taipei further drove home this point, she adds.

“I had third-grade kids [in Taipei] who were tri-lingual—that’s the first exposure I had to this type of education,” says Rogers, whose career milestones include program management with education nonprofit City Year Cleveland. “It’s a normal way for kids abroad to grow up. That had not been my experience in Cleveland.”

A capstone project on language immersion schools at the Cleveland Leadership Center equipped Rogers to develop the GALA model. Now finishing year nine, the academy is pushing ahead on instruction that Rogers says seamlessly merges language and culture.

“When learning Mandarin or Spanish, you can’t just do it as a commodity separate from the culture,” she explains. “In Spanish class, kids are still going to celebrate the Lunar New Year. We have school-wide celebrations for all these events.”

GALA’s 300 students begin learning their chosen foreign language from the first day in class.Nor does all learning take place strictly in the classroom. The trip to China, funded by host city Chengdu’s foreign affairs office, crowns an educational journey that will ideally follow graduates to high school, Rogers adds.

“It’s setting them up for college as well,” Rogers argues. “They’re not just speaking to someone in a different language, they have skills they can put on a resume or for working abroad. Language immersion schools can also help attract talent to Cleveland.”

One persistent challenge for GALA is funding. State dollars are bolstered by ongoing operational fundraising. GALA also receives federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants, currently on the chopping block under the second Trump administration.

Rogers is closely monitoring the grant, which could be eliminated by the wide reach of Trump's Congressional spending bill. That has not stopped GALA from preparing a move to the former McKinley Elementary School on West 125^th Street in West Park, a $20 million project that Rogers says will give the academy more room to grow.

Built to last
In spite of adding a grade a year since inception, Rogers says GALA still feels like home for its diverse multilingual learners.

“We’re like a family here,” Rogers says. “When our kids in high school don’t have school, they come to GALA. What teen wants to go to their old school when they have a day off from high school?”

The lasting friendships and cherished memories of student Nadia McKay forged at GALA guarantee a lifelong connection to her alma mater. McKay also has advice for other kids thinking about going to her former school.

“I tell them if you don’t go to GALA, you’ll regret it,” says Nadia. “It was a great opportunity for me to expand my learning of Chinese.”