Frequently asked questions
Is CHICLE Language Institute a non-profit?
No, we aren't. We are a Limited Liability Company that presently has three partners. When we started planning in 1999, we felt that it would be too difficult to rely on grants for the organization that we were setting up. However, we never envisioned having a "Big Business". So we keep our rates as low as we can while paying our staff as well as we can. We did, however, set up a separate non-profit entitled CHICLE Institute. We have not done as much with this as we would like though. We welcome help with this.
What is your organization's real name?
That's a long story. We originally decided to use the Chapel Hill Institute for Cultural and Language Education, because we thought that the acronym, CHICLE, was clever, memorable, and was in line with our original identity as a Spanish school. We are actually registered as the Chapel Hill Institute OF Cultural and Language Education due to a mistake made in filling out the form. As CHICLE has grown way beyond being just a Spanish school, we have recently started calling ourselves the CHICLE Language Institute, which we hope implies a broader scope of activities.
What are your holiday and weather policies?
We do not schedule classes on major holidays but are happy to accomodate any students that want to have private or small group classes on those days. We are generally closed from Wednesday through the weekend for Thanksgiving and from about December 23 to the first Monday in January.
Our children's classes during the school year follow the Chapel Hill/Carrboro school calendar, unless they are home-schooler classes.
Our snow policies are also based on the schools system's decision. If the Chapel Hill/Carrboro schools are closed, we cancel our morning classes. Afternoon and evening classes are not automatically cancelled. We make that decision on the day. We try to get in touch with all afternoon and evening students if we cancel those classes but are not always successful. Students and teachers can check our phone message at (919) 933-0398 which we do keep updated during bad weather.
How would you describe CHICLE's students?
We can't. They are indescribable—young and old, lots of ethnicities, speakers of many languages, travelers, health care workers, school teachers, students on our Meet CHICLE students page.