Title III Back-to School with Multilinguals: Intro to Series
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.”
These are the words of American engineer and statistician W. Edwards Deming. I often carry them with me into my work as an educational practitioner.
When it comes to enrolling potential multilingual learners (and determining who might qualify for English-specific support services), a clear process is critical. After all, clarity and consistency create calm. Not to mention, they help ensure that we’re achieving legal compliance.
Intake protocol will vary by district, and sometimes by school, too. Your procedures should make sense for your organization. It is also imperative that they take into careful account national, state and district expectations for student enrollment, registration and ELL placement. But the nuts-and-bolts of these procedures are non-negotiable. They’re clearly outlined by the federal government and further detailed by the Office of Civil Rights.
Each time I work with schools in creating these documents, we begin by examining current intake procedures. I generally start with the one big open-ended curiosity: What does the enrollment process for potential multilinguals look like?
Responses are solicited from various stakeholders: front office staff, ELD leads, classroom teachers, and principals. More often than not, most folks have a whole lot of trouble describing this process.
Think for a moment on your organization (we’re not calling ya’ll out here, just pointing out opportunities for better serving kids!). Who can clearly map out this process? Can team members answer, for example:
Who are the first school personnel that potential students and their family members see when they walk in the door?
Exactly how is registration handled?
What about secondary processes for probable ELLs?
How consistent are these procedures?
Who is aware that they exist?
Where is registration information stored?
What types of translation services are available to families?
Who checks (and re-checks) files for accuracy?
Asking questions and evaluating responses alongside school administrators always reveals a few surprises- and a lot of loopholes. In this space, we have room and perspective to analyze what works and what doesn’t, what to keep and what to toss (outside of compliance-regulated components, of course). We are also able to determine critical missing links (communication and clarity usually take the top spots), and get to work filling those holes in purposeful, directed ways. The focus is on simplicity- creating a process that can be easily explained by any key stakeholder at the school.
We’ll begin with a look at the Home Language Survey (HLS). Continue on to our next article to learn more!
