What happens at the level of the classroom, school, and district if and when an ELL registers at your school? When somebody registers, the first thing looked at is the language survey, which has questions on the back regarding the languages spoken at home. There are four questions: (1) What language did your son/daughter learn when he/she first began to talk?; (2) What language does your son/daughter most frequently use at home?; (3) What language do you use most frequently to speak to your son/daughter?; and (4) Name the languages in the order most often spoken by the adults at home. If any of the answers to the first three are a language other than English, then the school is required to test them within 30 days with the California English Language Development Test (CELD Test). There are five levels of proficiency on that test: advanced, early advanced, intermediate, early intermediate, and beginning. In the Piedmont School District, they like kids to be at the advanced level. If they are not at the advanced level, then they will generally be seen in the EL program, a pull-out program of individuals or small groups who the ELD teachers might work with for anywhere from one period (30 minutes) to five or six periods a week. At the primary grades, there is enough language going on in the classroom to meet their needs, but when totally non-English speaking students come in to the EL program in the upper grades, it becomes a matter of getting them to develop some vocabulary and some concept development so they can at least know what is going on in the class. Those kids are tested at the beginning of every year, which is an ongoing thing for anyone who has been in the program. After a child has exited the program, they are followed for two years. This goes beyond what their scores on the CELD Test are; they need to be doing well in the classroom, meeting the standards of the grade in which they are in, and they need to do well on the standards in the CAT6 test. So, if a teacher says a student is not performing at the level they need to, or if the parents question the child� achievement, then we usually do see them or support them, whether it is making recommendations to the teacher or support in general. Teachers in the classroom are to have their CLAD Certification, so they often have to make modifications and do some lessons that are appropriate for students who are not fluent in English. It might mean pulling a small group inside and doing some special instruction or having an aid work with the child. It is up to the classroom teacher to meet the needs of that child in their mainstream classroom. The ELD specialists try to provide resources for the teachers, and often give ELL students activities to do in the classroom if there is not a thing they can understand.

Who teaches them or provides them with other needed services? The ELD resource specialist and her aid pull out children for anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours per week. Every now and then there is an EL student who struggles in other areas as well and it goes beyond just a language issue. They are also provided with the extra services they need in the resource room by resource specialists, reading specialists, speech and language specialists, etc.

Where do the resources (monetary or otherwise) that these services require originate? The district gives the ELD program about $12 per student for the whole year for whatever resources are needed for them. There is funding for aid time that comes from the district, and the aid at this school is used primarily for instruction and some clerical work. There are some state funds, but because it� such a small district, that amount is fairly low. The state has mandated a lot, but the school and district must find their own way to get the resources they need to implement these things. This district is very thoughtful and concerned that our EL students meet their potential. The ELD specialist uses funding that comes from the school and parent organizations to purchase resource books.

Describe any program that your school has to work with English learners and its relative status within the school. This district has not adopted any program that the teachers in the classroom use, but there is a big effort to be very strong in the language arts. Most of the teachers will use a basal language program to some extent but have reading groups with a lot of guided reading, shared reading, and independent reading to help all the students. The ELD specialist has been using a Scott Foresman program called Accelerated English Language Learning with many of her students in the pull-out programs because it emphasizes literacy skills, and also gets into the science and social studies subject areas. It has a lot of exposure to concepts and vocabulary. In addition, the ELD specialist uses the Word by Word program, published by Longman, which includes literacy workbooks and phonics workbooks.