Students who come into the Clark County School District speaking a language other than English don’t necessarily fare well.
While CCSD has a graduation rate of 72 percent – something Trustee Linda Young said last week is not adequate – the graduation rate for English Language Learner (ELL) students is 26 percent.
Let that sink in. Seventy-four percent of kids whose first language is not English end up dropping out.
Now here’s another statistic – about one third of CCSD students fall into this group.
To that end, CCSD has created and is starting to implement a comprehensive master plan to completely re-engineer the English Language Learning program.
The program will inform how teachers interact with students. It will require intensive teacher training, which is starting this summer.
Ingnacio Ruiz is the assistant superintendent of ELL at CCSD. He told KNPR's State of Nevada that it is a comprehensive plan that will take in all teachers and all students, regardless if a school has a high population of ELL students.
The biggest shift is how language is taught, Ruiz explained. Instead of language being separated from the content being covered in class, language and content will go hand in hand in the classroom.
“In the past, our English language learners had content class and separately they were developing their language and they were missing out on a lot of the content such as math, science and social studies,” he said.
Ruiz said new research shows that putting the two components together improves language skills faster. He also said the system helps kids who speak English as their first language but may have language deficiencies.
To make the plan work, a bilingual teacher is not needed, Ruiz said. Instead, the teachers need to be "leveraging what students bring with them," whether that's language skills or cultural assets.
Maria Vega is a teacher and ELL coordinator at Cheyenne High School. She said making sense of where a student is coming from helps in teaching English language learners.
“It is more about understanding the culture of their students where they’re coming from so they can have a better perspective of how to teach them,” she said.
Vega said "the typical classroom is going away." She said there will be more engagement between teachers and students and between students and students.
She said some ELL students won't engage with teachers because of their accent but they will talk with their friends.
Ruiz said there would not only be extensive training for teachers, but also extensive support for those teachers and school administrators. Success of the program will be measured by several metrics, including how many students show language proficiency and how many are moved from the ELL category into the non-ELL category.
The initial roll out of the program will be 80 to 85 schools in the 2016-2017 school year.
Ignacio Ruiz, Assistant Superintendent of ELL at CCSD; Maria Vega, teacher and ELL coordinator at Cheyenne High School
