Questions emerge about GISD bilingual program

Oct. 19—Some Gainesville ISD parents are concerned after learning that the district's dual-language program does not currently extend beyond the fourth grade.

"The only reason I live in Gainesville is because of the dual-language program," Martin Phillips told the school board Monday night. "We were living in Muenster and found out about the dual-language program, and we moved here to be a part of that ... The children that are in that program, their brains develop differently. It's important to me. I didn't learn until I was at the parent-teacher conference the other week that the program isn't continuing."

Phillips is the father of a fourth-grade student and a member of the Gainesville City Council.

There has been some miscommunication about the program and some parents were caught off-guard following school meetings with teachers.

"I believe that, as a parent, I think that is the frustration that I didn't find out until the conference is very sad," said GISD board member Latecia Hendricks. "I think we need to be more open, transparent..."

The program GISD uses — the Gomez and Gomez Model — is a Pre-K through fifth-grade program. However, GISD still intends to use the program and strategies for sixth grade, due to fifth and sixth grades both being on the Intermediate campus while seventh and eighth grades are at the junior high.

"We want to do that because we don't want students to have to miss a year before they are offered Spanish at the junior high," Amber Rains, the director of the bilingual and ESL program at GISD, told the Register. "If our middle school was sixth, seventh, eighth, then it would definitely be good to not allow students to miss that year."

GISD has plans to extend the program's use through sixth grade to allow students to not miss a year; however, due to staffing shortages, the program has been halted at the intermediate level.

"Our ideal is to offer it through sixth grade, given we have the staff," said Rains. "Because of staffing is why it is kind of halted at fourth grade, because we don't have enough certified bilingual teachers to teach the bilingual program at the intermediate campus ... but we have to stop it where our teachers stop. Right now, we're through fourth grade this year and we do not have a fifth or sixth grade bilingual class right now."

Working on it

The district is working toward offering an intermediate bilingual class.

"We have reached out, and we're working in conjunction with a company called GEC, and that is allowing us to hire outside the country and then bring them in and potentially certify them within our district," said Rains. "They can be here for about five years, and that's how we've been able to acquire some; we have seven that we hired this year in our district from that, and we feel like we'll continue with that program and get more."

Superintendent DesMontes Stewart acknowledged the miscommunication, but he promised Monday that the district is working to fix it.

"We're doing everything within our power to get people into that program," said Stewart. "But I agree... communication does need to take place in addition, and we'll make sure that happens.

Additional confusion has come from statements made by a previous GISD staff member who left without seeing the project through.

"We were all told that it would go all the way through senior year," stated Hendricks. "When we all started, it was stated that there was some special curriculum and they would get a stamp or something on their diplomas that they were certified in the language."

What Hendricks is referring to is a biliteracy seal that was discussed, but GISD has not been able to make happen.

"That was something that a previous Assistant Superintendent had flashed in, flashed up," explained Rains in the board meeting. She elaborated the next day to the Register, "Under previous leadership, she brought in the idea of a biliteracy seal for graduation, but we've not been able to fulfill that. She kind of came in and left without any sort of guidance on what that would be... There's a lot that encompasses the seal of biliteracy, and our district has not adopted that particular plan."

Bilingual offerings

There are many types of bilingual models used at GISD.

The first two are the Dual Language program models. According to Rains, each grade level through third grade have one-way programs. These allow students who speak one language, such as a group of only students who speak Spanish, to learn in English and Spanish. At fourth grade, GISD has a two-way program, where students from English-speaking and Spanish-speaking backgrounds would be mixed together and learn in both languages.

There are also English as a Second Language (ESL) programs focused on content or being pulled out of class to help English Language Learners (ELLs) better understand English.

"Our expectation is for all content teachers to be ESL certified," said Rains during the school board meeting. "Obviously, we're falling short of that, and we have for several years. TEA (Texas Education Agency) allows us to get a waiver and exception to put into a plan how we're going to get those certifications."

Gainesville currently employs 111 ESL certified teachers and seven bilingual certified teachers.

Students who enroll in anything other than English on their Home Language Survey are tested to see if they score as a fluent English speaker, where they would already be fluent and not be in the dual-language program. The majority of students, however, are not yet to that level, and instead are considered emergent bilinguals, where they are then tested to see if they would be better suited for the dual language program or the ESL program.

In Fall of 2021, 896 of GISD's 3,145 total students (28.5 percent) were identified as emergent bilinguals. That number increased to 906 emergent bilinguals in May of 2022.

The goal is for the students to be reclassified as English Proficient after about six years based on their GPA and end of year testing. However, only two students have been reclassified in the program, with 368 emergent bilingual students having been in the program more than five years without being reclassified as english proficient.

However, Rains claims we are likely to see a change in the near future due to better understanding of the test.

"One of the things that we're struggling with and have struggled with recently is the new format for TELPAS (Texas English Language Proficiency Assessment System) testing," explained Rains. "It's solely online, and our students really struggle with speaking into a microphone into the computer, and that really has been a major thing keeping our students because they have to score advanced on all four domains of TELPAS, which is listening, speaking, reading and writing, and listening and speaking require the microphone... Now TEA has released a practice where they can actually get on a computer and practice doing this, whereas before, the test was the first time they actually talked with the microphone, so I do foresee more reclassifications happening in the future."

Growing need

The bilingual and dual-language program at GISD has been largely focused on Spanish, with students learning both English and Spanish. This includes a large number of ESL students. According to the TEA and txschools.gov, GISD student enrollment is 59.8 percent Hispanic.

However, these are not the only two languages spoken at home by students at GISD. According to Home Language Surveys, there are eight languages various GISD students speak and learn at home: English, Spanish, Russian, Filipino (Tagalog), Gujarati (Indian), Arabic, French and Vietnamese.

"Most people just think of it just being English and Spanish," said Rains. "But we really do have multiple languages."