PCA has been devoted to providing students of all ages with the opportunity to learn the Mandarin language and a deeper understanding of Chinese culture ever since it was founded in 2007 in Peters Township. Before PCA, many children in the South Hills area went to Chinese schools relatively far away. In order to give back to the local community and to strengthen it with cultural diversity, local families banded together to bring PCA to reality out of nothing but students willing to learn and parents willing to teach. We started out by meeting at the Peters Township Library with less than 20 students, but as the number of students quickly grew to about 50, we moved to St. Benedicts in 2008 in order to provide our students with more space.

             It was that year that our first New Years Party was held to celebrate the Chinese New Year. PCA was determined to not only teach Mandarin and show an important aspect of Chinese culture, but also peak the students’ interest in understanding Chinese culture. As the years passed, we started to offer different culture classes such as traditional dance for both children and adults, drawing, and western chess in addition to our language classes. We stayed at St. Benedicts until Fall of 2011 when we once again changed locations to our current one, Center Presbyterian Church.

             While the location changed, our dedication had not and we continued to do our best to teach our students. While the dance classes were stopped due to a lack of interest, we continued the drawing classes and the western chess classes along with more classes such as kung fu, tai chi for adults, calligraphy, and conversation. Our tradition of holding New Years Parties persisted even as we started to also celebrate the Moon Festival with moon-cakes. PCA’s principals, vice principals, and school board demonstrated tremendous dedication to the school in order to ensure an education to for our students as they grew and worked with diligence. As a result of dedicated teaching, many of our high school students got full scores on the Chinese AP exams..

             From 2007 to now, our principals (Tongyan Li, Shuping Liu, Xiuman Zhu, Julie Xing Munsick, Ke (Coco) Wang, and our current principal, Chang Shu) work hard alongside our vice principals (Shuping Liu, Deborah Busche, and our current vice principal, Hong Sun), our School Board and our donors. We are all working to tailor the school towards making learning fun and enjoyable for our students.