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Schools

Growing Need for ESOL Services in Public Schools

The English for Speakers of Other Languages student-teacher ratio in some local schools is double the overall county ratio.

At 9:35 on a Wednesday morning, Lisa Craft helps her sixth grade students creatively interpret and act out the relationship between the British and the American colonists. 

At 9:55 she’s sitting at a pint-sized round table, assisting a group of lively kindergarteners in their use of picture dictionaries to strengthen their vocabularies and spelling skills. 

Just 15 minutes later Craft has switched gears again, and is teaching third graders Cherokee math, a technique for multiplying large numbers. She has several more classrooms to visit before the day’s end.

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Craft is a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at Centreville Elementary School. The U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey results shows that 40 percent of Centreville residents age 5 and over speak a language other than English at home. In the midst of the heavy need for ESOL services in Fairfax County Public Schools, the school system has made significant changes to its elementary program.

Formerly, teachers pulled ESOL students out of their general education classrooms to provide private instruction. Today the focus is on integrating students into their general education classrooms. Throughout the school day certified ESOL teachers visit classes, helping students practice their English skills within each subject, rather than removing them from class to complete isolated vocabulary and grammar drills.  

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The current method, education experts and the county school system agree, is beneficial for the students. However, it does put a strain on elementary ESOL instructors, who each week must tend to hundreds of students’ individual needs in classrooms across all grade levels. 

While the county reports that the overall ESOL student to teacher ratio in the county this school year is 33.3 to 1, the ratio in many local elementary schools is much higher.

For 2009-2010, the ESOL student to teacher ratio was 76.3 to 1 at Colin Powell, 70 to 1 at Centreville, 68 to 1 at Bull Run, and 60 to 1 at Centre Ridge.

Teddi Predaris, Director of Fairfax County Public Schools' Office of Language Acquisition and Title I, said, “From the day they enroll, ESOL students are learning English through the content areas, as opposed to isolation, but in a way that’s appropriate for their current proficiency level.”   

Dr. Rebecca Fox, an associate professor in the English as a Second Language PK-12 department at George Mason University, noted that students new to the U.S. with no English language proficiency initially “do benefit from some self-contained classroom work to help them learn enough basic communication skills for classroom application.” 

“Then,” Fox continued, “as quickly as is feasible, English language learners should be included in mainstream classroom instruction," because research has shown that students "benefit the most from learning English in context and through academic content.”  

“There’s no separate ESOL curriculum at the elementary level, because we have the same high expectations for ESOL students as we do for all students,” said Predaris.

Fox believes that the best results are achieved when general education teachers and ESOL specialists work together, as they do in local schools.

“Fairfax County Public Schools and our Northern Virginia area are among the leaders in the nation in the ways in which we work with our English language learners,” she said.

Rocio Miranda, a native of Peru, whose son Fabrizio is a third grade ESOL student at Centreville Elementary School, speaks limited English herself. Prior to attending school, her children only spoke Spanish at home. “I wanted my son to be in the program to better articulate and perfect his English,” she said.

Fabrizio entered the program with a low English proficiency, level 1 on a scale of 1-6, where 6 indicates near-native fluency. He has already improved to a level 3. Miranda’s oldest child is now in middle school and his command of English is so strong that he no longer needs ESOL services.  

Many other families in the area also speak Spanish; but over a quarter of the population in Centreville comes from an Asian background, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2009-2010, Centreville’s nine public elementary schools housed a total of 1,160 ESOL students, nearly 16 percent of area students in grades K-6.* Race and English proficiency varies widely. With almost a quarter of its students in need of services, had the most ESOL students, followed closely behind by and . That's in stark contrast to and Union Mill elementary schools, where 5 percent or less were enrolled in the ESOL program.

With such a huge demand for services, there are obstacles to overcome.

“I think one of the challenges we have is we are asking ESOL students to make more progress in a single academic year [than their native English-speaking peers], especially in reading,” said Margo Dias-Pareja, the principal of Centre Ridge and a former ESOL instructor herself. Many new ESOL students begin the school year well below their grade’s reading level, but the county still requires them to accelerate to the level of their peers by the end of the year.

ESOL students must also go through specialized testing each year, which takes several weeks for instructors to administer. Some teachers regret that so much testing results in lost instructional time.

Fox, the GMU professor, wrote in an email that the benefits of these assessments far outweigh the inconveniences, because “results provide an individualized approach to formative and summative testing that is not achieved through other means."

Despite the breakneck pace of her day, Lisa Craft finds her job a rewarding one.

“When you look at an ESOL student’s writing sample from September and compare it to one they’ve written in June--that’s the icing on the cake; you know they’ve made that progress...these kids are just remarkable,” she said.

*Click on "view gallery" to see the attached .pdf document for more information on ESOL students in Centreville elementary schools. The tables and figures were designed by the author, using data from the 2009-2010 school year. Data from Union Mill Elementary School, located in Clifton, was included because its students feed into Centreville High.

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