Santa Maria Joint Union High School District celebrated nearly 300 English learner students who achieved English proficiency at the district’s third annual “reclassification celebration,” which was scheduled for Tuesday, March 28.
Students honored at the celebration worked through the district’s Multilingual and Migrant Education Program, which helps to incorporate English language instruction into class curriculums, according to Maria Larios-Horton, who heads the program. This guides the district’s 1,900 English language learners toward reclassification as “English proficient,” by state standards.
“Our data indicates that our reclassified students do very well,” Larios-Horton told the Sun. “They are more likely to graduate high school with college-going requirements. Their ability to go to a four-year right out of high school increases significantly if they are reclassified, which is a huge incentive.”
Larios-Horton estimates that 30 to 40 percent of students who come into the district as English language learners reclassify by the time they graduate. The Multilingual and Migrant Education Program is working toward increasing that number by working with teachers on their lesson plans.
“The hope and the idea is they’re getting the language instruction via their teachers’ lessons and tasks that the teachers incorporate throughout the day,” Larios-Horton said. English learner students are also expected to take a two-period block class for English language and literacy. When students reclassify, that class block opens up for them to take electives of their choice.
Larios-Horton said that four years ago, the district would successfully reclassify about 9 percent of its English language learners per year. This past year, 15.7 percent of those students were reclassified as English proficient.
“We’re moving the needle, slowly but surely, by additional attention to language instruction and literacy instruction in our schools,” she said.
But that doesn’t solve the big-picture problem: Ideally, students who begin kindergarten as English learners should cross the proficiency threshold by middle school. The state has five learning levels to pass before an English language learner reclassifies, and English learners take yearly state tests to measure their growth in the language. Ideally, a student should be able to pass one growth level per year—but according to Larios-Horton, that’s not happening.
“The long-standing issue and problem in our state and across the nation is that our students are not progressing one proficiency level per year. It’s taking our students quite long to reach proficiency,” she said. “Many students come to our high schools not having that proficiency for a lot of different reasons.”
In May 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found that California didn’t adequately monitor its public schools’ language instruction to English learners under the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which requires state and local education agencies to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers among students.
The DOJ alleged that this inadequate instruction was the reason behind California’s high proportion of long-term English learners, or students who have been enrolled in California schools for at least six years but haven’t made good progress in learning English and are struggling academically.
In Santa Barbara County, 35 percent of public school students are English language learners—of whom 62.7 percent are long-term English learners, according to 2015 data from the California Department of Education. Larios-Horton said that many of the high school district’s English learners are in the school system for 10 years before reclassifying as proficient.
And since English proficiency means a better shot at college, those numbers are bad news.
Larios-Horton pointed out that another incentive for gaining proficiency in English is that multilingual students usually outperform those who only speak one language.
“We know that there is great benefit to speaking many languages, and so that is why we are celebrating our students,” she said of the reclassification celebration. “We not only recognize the students for learning English, but we also like to recognize the fact that it is an important 21st century skill to be multilingual, so it’s really a celebration of multilingualism, not just the fact that they’ve learned English.”
She added that she hopes the reclassification celebration will serve as yet another encouragement for the district’s English learners to work toward proficiency.
“By celebrating this accomplishment, it’ll help our students see the value of literacy and language, and help them get there faster,” she said.
School Scene was compiled by Staff Writer Brenna Swanston. Information should be sent to the Sun via fax, email, or mail.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 6, 2017.
