LEA Spotlight: Aldine ISD, TX
An interview with Altagracia H. Delgado,
Executive Director of Multilingual Services in Aldine ISD
By Carol Salva
English Learners (ELs) in public schools rose from 4.5 million in 2010 to 5 million in 2018 (US Department of Education, 2016). The world is witnessing record levels of displacement due to war, persecution, and civil unrest. If there are more English learners/multilingual learners in our classrooms than ever before, how do education
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leaders work collaboratively to advocate effectively for them? With these issues at the forefront of many program leaders’ minds, it is helpful to know what is being done in some districts to address the issue of equity for the ever-changing demographics we serve.
Altagracia H. Delgado is beginning her 2nd year as the Executive Director of Multilingual Services in Aldine ISD in Houston, Texas. She is hopeful for the multilingual learners of Aldine ISD where over 23,000 students (or 38%) are identified as English Learners. According to Delgado, effective practices of advocacy and equity are the collective responsibility of all program leaders in her district. Her exchange with Carol Salva, NAELPA Professional Learning Committee Lead, offers insight on why this is important and how their district leaders are collaborating.
How do you address equity in Aldine ISD? What comes to mind first when you hear that term?
Understanding what equity means and how to get to it is a little more complicated than talking about it, reading about it, or just entertaining a hashtag. Equity in education is the process of improving practices, guidelines, and methods at the school and district levels to support fairness and inclusion in academics, and assure that every child has the teachers, resources, and support they are guaranteed in order to be successful. It is imperative that equity work takes place and, even though it can be complicated, it is necessary in order to make sure that all students benefit from the full scope of the educational opportunities it can provide. However, for the equity work to really take shape, many players have to come to the table to talk and compromise in the actual work that needs to be done. Those people hold roles such as teachers, instructional specialists, principals and assistant principals, content directors and literacy and math program directors, other content areas executive directors (SPED, Advanced Academics, Teaching and Learning), school area superintendents, the chief academic officer and the district superintendent. The goal is to share knowledge and give everyone voice, so the responsibility is not falling just on the multilingual department. It is a collective responsibility that we owe our students.
What are the priorities for educating English learners?
We know that multilingual learners need linguistic accommodations to access tier 1 instruction. These students need to learn content in a new language, while also learning the nuisances of that new language. But while this student population is on track to continue to increase, these questions remain: Do school districts have the resources available at each of their schools? Do they have teachers that can support these students? Do they have appropriate teacher training? Do they have mechanisms of support for these students’ families so that they, in turn, can support their children? Effective advocacy creates the habit of checking for all students, always asking who is in your classroom and if we have everything we need for these students in order to create an accessible, rigorous curriculum. Effective advocacy can create this centralized collaboration, but it does require letting go of egos in order to do what is best for kids.
Can you tell us more about collective responsibility? How is Aldine ISD approaching that goal?
We are having honest conversations about how we are addressing the needs of multilingual learners and, if we are not doing a good job, are looking for ways to make it better. Together, district leaders are focused on aligning our services and supports to a unified instructional framework while embedding linguistic support through professional development and accessible resources for all schools.
We have created a Multilingual Collective Learning Group, a group of district leaders from the classroom to central office, that meets to learn together about best practices in bilingual education, analyzes the current practices of the district, and makes recommendations for improvement. In the spring, the elementary group crafted a vision framework for the district with expectations for all stakeholders and an implementation plan that includes resources and professional learning opportunities for teachers and staff. This framework also created a recommendation to change some of our programming for our students, moving away from a transitional bilingual program to a dual language model. The secondary groups are now meeting to refine the vision framework and delineate the work that needs to happen as our students move through our education system and prepare for life after high school.