Students learning English in the Cherry Creek School District are no longer being singled out and pulled from class to study the language.
In the final year of a district-wide rollout to a model that started in 2007, the students who don’t speak English fluently — about 5,700 — now stay in mainstream classrooms with peers who speak English, and sometimes with teachers who have never before taught kids needing help learning a language.
Instead, “English-language acquisition specialists” roam from class to class to help teach various periods of the day and create lesson plans with teachers who need help engaging all of their students.
“Before, the teacher was always catching up,” said Katie Caskey, an ELA specialist at Holly Ridge Primary Elementary.
As the number of English-learner students increased in Cherry Creek, in some schools as many as 60 percent of kids in a classroom were being pulled out to study English, she said, and “it made no sense.” The district was the largest in the state to receive a grant last year for its work with English learners.
Now, co-teaching means teachers work together to provide English instruction all day.
“We’re modeling strategies teachers can use throughout the day, and we form relationships with each other to learn from each other,” Caskey said. “I learn a ton.”
District officials say students are excelling and parents are happier, with less of them opting children out of the program.
“We always have room for growth, but we’re in the ‘exceeds’ category, so I would say we are doing pretty well,” said Holly Porter, director of English-language acquisition for the Cherry Creek district. “Eighty-six percent of our schools made their adequate growth.”
From 2005 through 2015, the number of English learners in Cherry Creek schools almost doubled, while the total number of students grew 12 percent. Currently, English learners represent about 11 percent of all its students (54,449).
Data provided by the district shows nearly 85 percent of the district’s English learners are able to exit services by proving English proficiency within three years. Once they left, more of them scored proficient or advanced on state tests than native-English speakers.
The Colorado Department of Education recognized the district last year with the department’s first round of English Language Proficiency Act excellence awards. The award recognized the state’s top 10 districts and top 10 charter schools based on English-learner academic performance. Department officials will publish a statewide report on the districts’ best practices by March.
“We’re hoping the report will identify trends and that other districts might be able to implement the best practices,” said Lindsay Swanton, state coordinator for the English Language Proficiency Act.
Around the metro area, districts have a number of programs and strategies for getting students to learn English.
The Douglas County School District has used co-teaching for eight years as one of a variety of supports each school can choose to use. Denver Public Schools, under a courtmandate, is required to offer support services in many of the native languages their students speak.
In Mary Baur’s second-grade classroom in Cherry Creek, about 12 students are not fluent in English, but their native languages vary, and all are at different levels of proficiency.
Last week, during a morning literacy lesson, specialist Caskey joined the class to co-teach. Both teachers walked from one tiny desk to another helping students without differentiating which one was an English learner or not, always speaking English to them. One boy needed help writing a sentence, another girl hurriedly finished her work but had spelled a word incorrectly, and another student wanted the teacher to draw a picture for him.
The drawings were half of the assignment, purposefully so, as a way to engage students who still can’t write in English.
“Some of the kids want to share their idea but don’t know how to write and they feel more successful” when they can draw a picture, Caskey said.
Modeling or acting out words and directions, showing pictures and asking kids to group together also are key.
“If they want to speak in their native language with each other, we totally encourage that,” Caskey said.
But teachers find that toward the end of the year, students are speaking mostly in English.
Keeping children bilingual is something the district wants parents to work on, but with about 140 languages spoken in the district, and the largest, Spanish, making up only about 41 percent, it’s not a focus in the schools. Some teachers do have books and volunteers for support in other languages, she said.
“We don’t have the resources for us to try to have supports in every language,” Porter said. “It’s a near impossibility.”
