Around Town
‘New Canaan Korean School’ Marks Two Years
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It was 2023, the year that pandemic-related restrictions finally lifted, when Dr. Nara Jeong, New Canaan mom to two girls, began looking for a Korean language school for her kids. Her younger daughter was having “some difficulty with speaking in both languages, English and Korean,” Jeong recalled on a recent afternoon. Yet the closest Korean language schools were about 40 minutes away—in Scarsdale, N.Y. and New Haven, she recalled, and were operated under the auspices of churches. Jeong enrolled her kids in the latter school but “it was still too far for me, with my kids’ schedules getting busier on the weekends, especially with sports.”
After talking to the former principal of a Korean school in Hartford, Neong and some of her friends within New Canaan’s small Korean population —including fellow parents at the United Methodist Preschool—decided to launch their own. “They really want their kids to learn Korean,” she said.