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I am the admissions coordinator at St. Mary of the Assumption School in Brookline. St. Mary’s currently has a population of 202 students. St. Mary’s has a very diverse student population with 31% white, 26% Asian, 17% African American, 15% multi-racial, 10% Hispanic and 2% other background. Unfortunately, St. Marys does not currently have any ELL programs or supports. With a large number of our population being non-native english speakers, it is disheartening that there is no program to help these students and families.

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I’m in the Wakefield public school district. We do have a high ELL population, and many of them are from our city METCO program. Within their schedule, they are often bumped out of their elective classes (art, PE, health, etc) and absorbed into an ELL class in that period. The resources are low as we share one teacher with the elementary schools in the district. What I’ve noticed is that many of them are considered to be an ELL student because their first language at home isn’t English, however they themselves are fluent in the language. When I do get the kids in class, I haven’t had any issues with language barriers to the curriculum.
As a part of our PD session last year, we had a 5 part series around ELL. This obviously wasn’t an endorsement but it was a program for all teachers in our district to learn strategies on how to instruct those students.

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At Pine Grove School, we share an EL teacher with one other elementary school in the district. Our EL teacher spends her afternoons at our school, servicing students and collaborating with teachers. At our school, there are 6 ELLs, 4 of which are housed in my class. One of my EL students is a newcomer from China, which has made for an interesting and challenging past few months. These 6 EL students come from 6 different cultures, and their home lives are shaped by different socioeconomic statuses, family structures, living situations, and parental support. Together, these create important cultural considerations for teachers, school leaders, and community members. Due to the low number of ELL students, many teachers within the school and district are just beginning to gain knowledge on best practices for instructing ELLs.

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The EL program in Beverly has just undergone some changes. EL students in grades K-2 have just been relocated back to their neighborhood schools from the EL program at the Ayers Ryal Side school. At North Beverly we share an ELL teacher with Ayers. The teacher travels half way through the day to take her groups. Each K-2 classroom has between 2 and 3 ELL students. For the beginning of the year the ELL teacher was on maternity leave so her para was taking the ELL groups and supporting classroom reading instruction using Reading Street materials. Now that the EL teacher is back she has spent the entire month of January doing ACCESS testing, so the para has continued to take these groups. Just last week, we met and planned our reading blocks so that we could align our lessons and the EL teacher could continue to support our students and the lessons we are teaching in the classroom. She has also shared some great resources with us the have been developed by all EL teachers in the district and shared with the Ayers teachers when all students were in the program at that school. In my experience both of my students are complex cases. We are still working to determine if these students have learning issues in addition to their EL designation. Our biggest challenge is that grade 2 students receive their EL services in the middle of our math block. Because the teacher travels scheduling is difficult.

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My experience with actually working with ELs in my teaching is limited... the demographic wasn't there.. Since I have been working at the college level I have had more experience working with teachers in a variety of districts as well as undergraduates that are placed in districts all over the NorthShore.    The demographics vary from disctrict. but the commonality is that the numbers are rising.   There is a need for educators to be aware of the challenges that these students have.... and also the diversity and wealth of cultural identities that they add to the cloth of the class.   The world is small now and the more we understand other cultures  the easier it is to get along...

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I'm at the math coach at Hannah Elementary School in Beverly. We just absorbed ELLs from Ayers this year. We only had a handful of kids move to our school from Ayers, but last month we had 2 families move in to our community from Pakistan. There are 5 kids total who just started with us ranging from Kindergarten to 4th grade, and they all have very limited English. I have worked with all of the Pakistani kids for the last few weeks and they can all count up to 20, with one to one correspondence, so I have a good foundation to work with them on. We have a new SEI teacher in our building who is fantastic and just came to us from Revere. Just last week she delivered PD to the staff on how to work with ELs in math class, which I thought was very interesting.