Elgin School District U46 administrators are planning to expand the district’s dual-language learning (DLL) Spanish and English program to the middle-school level in August, probably starting at just Abbott, Ellis and Larsen middle schools in Elgin and Tefft Middle School in Streamwood.
Explaining the plan to the curriculum committee of the U46 Board of Education last week, Annette Acevedo, the director of English language learning initiatives, said expanding DLL to the middle-school level was part of the plan when the first such U46 program began in grades preschool through second garde in the 2011-2012 school year.
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Since then one more grade level has been added to DLL each year. If the school board approves, seventh-graders would become eligible for DLL next August, and the expansion would end with the addition of eighth-graders in 2017-2018.
Acevedo said the program may be limited to Abbott, Ellis, Larsen and Tefft because they have far more children in their attendance areas who are already taking DLL in elementary schools. Tefft has 176 such children, followed by Ellis with 173, Abbott with 151 and Larsen with 145.
By comparison, Kimball Middle School in Elgin has 78, Canton in Streamwood 63, Kenyon Woods in South Elgin 49 and Eastview in Bartlett just eight. If these schools do not get their own DLL programs, families living in those areas likely would be able to enroll DLL children in one of the four middle schools that do offer it.
Last school year elementary schools had 843 DLL students in fifth grade — the age group that will be hitting middle school next fall — and 1,021 in fourth grade, Acevedo said.
This year 20 of the district’s 40 elementary schools have some DLL classrooms, she said.
Acevedo said the tentative plan for middle schools is that seventh-graders who score a 3.5 or lower on an English-literacy test would take Spanish Language Arts and social studies taught in the Spanish language; take math, science and English taught by English as a Second Language teachers; and take physical education and a rotation or course election taught by general-education teachers.
Besides the DLL programs, Acevedo noted, three high schools and four middle schools already have English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, which aim to teach English to students whose native language is not only Spanish but such tongues as Russian, Polish, Chinese or Korean.
Assistant Superintendent Suzanne Johnson said middle-school DLL should not increase costs because it would represent a shifting of existing teacher job slots, not the addition of more teachers.