GUILDERLAND — The school district hopes to hire 2.5 additional teachers of English as a New Language, or ENL, next year. These would be distributed across the grade levels, with one for the high school, one for the middle school, and a half-time teacher for Westmere Elementary, said Demian Singleton, assistant superintendent for instruction.

The total salary for the three positions would be $197,500, with each full-time position paying $79,000.

Of the district’s five elementary schools, Westmere has the highest number of students learning English, said Marcia Ranieri, administrator for world language and English as a New Language for the district. There are currently four teachers and one teaching assistant at that elementary school, to serve about 91 students; the teaching assistant would be replaced by a certified teacher next year, said Ranieri.

It is impossible to predict precisely how many new ENL students the district will have in a given year, because, Ranieri said, “It’s really just dependent on how many families move into the district as compared with how many leave.”

District officials can make an educated guess, based on the patterns seen over the past four or five years, said Singleton, who noted that, during that period, the number of new English learners in the district has increased 400 percent.

The district currently has 14.2 ENL teachers, Singleton said, for its approximately 250 ENL learners. All of the teachers are full-time, and one is carrying a 1.2 load, he said.

Three full-time ENL teachers are at the high school, while the middle school has two.

The proposed new teachers are needed to “assist with balancing the courses students are taking,” Ranieri said.

In keeping with new state regulations that went into effect this school year, Ranieri said, most services are “push-in” rather than “pull-out”; learners are grouped with other ENL students in the same grade, and teachers attend classes with them.

ENL teachers in the classrooms don’t just help ENL students, Ranieri said; they help all students. “So the other students just see her as another teacher in the room,” Ranieri said, adding that all students benefit from these teachers’ presence.

Superintendent Marie Wiles said, “I think we are well on our way to meeting the requirements of the regulations.” Last year, the district added two more ENL teachers but not the six required by the state, considering that it would be too costly.

The biggest change, Wiles said, has been in the way teachers work with students — through a combination of push-in and pull-out services. This new regulation has meant that the district needed not only more staff, she said, but also more time for ENL teachers to plan together with classroom teachers.

Wiles had questioned the push-in policy when it first came out, she said. “We had tried to make the case to the State Education Department that our model is working — why change it?”

The State Education Department struggles, Wiles said, to deal flexibly with school districts that are already implementing successful programs.

Ranieri reflected that the biggest challenge for ENL teachers comes from this particular regulation. “We don’t see students one-on-one like we used to in a pull-out setting. Teachers are finding that they would love more time with students, like they used to have.”

There will be 15 new students coming to the middle school next year from the district’s five elementary schools, for a total of 25 or 30 ENL students at the middle school.

In terms of number of students assigned to one teacher, “We try to observe best practices,” Ranieri said, adding, “We try to keep the numbers in the single digits.” So, if a new teacher is added, the middle school would have three teachers for its 25 to 30 children.  

Among the district’s five elementary schools, Guilderland has the second-highest number of new English learners, and Altamont has the fewest, with seven.

One of the regulations governing ENL is that, if there are 20 or more ENL students in a similar grade level who speak the same language, the district is obligated to provide bilingual education for them. So far that situation has not arisen, said Ranieri, because there is no one language with that number of ENL students in the same grade.

Wiles said the district is not currently equipped to meet that requirement.

She said that, first of all, “That person doesn’t exist,” referring to a bilingual Mandarin Chinese classroom teacher; she explained that the pool of bilingual certified classroom teachers is very small.

She added that the numbers of ENL students with the same native language fluctuate from year to year, and so while there might be 20 Mandarin speakers in second grade one year, there might not be the next, but there might be 20 fourth-grade speakers of an Indian dialect. Wiles said that fulfilling this requirement might be possible for some schools in urban centers, but that it is not realistic for Guilderland.

Asked whether many children these days come with parents who are here for high-tech jobs, Ranieri said no. “It used to be the case that children came because their parents were studying at the University at Albany,” said Ranieri, “and they would stay for just two years. Now it’s families that are moving and staying here.”  

The majority, Ranieri said, speak an Indian dialect, such as Hindi, Urdu, or Telugu.

Word travels quickly within the students’ communities about Guilderland’s ENL program, Ranieri said, especially since the district is one of only a few in the Capital District to offer ENL programs in the summer. Two years ago, she had a request from a family in the Bethlehem school district that wanted to register its children for Guilderland’s summer program; Guilderland could not accommodate the family’s request, though, since it cannot take children from outside the district, Ranieri said.

The newest language seen in Guilderland’s ENL program is Chuukese, she said, an Austronesian language found in the islands of Micronesia.

The graduation rate for ENL students was, said Ranieri, as of 2014-15, five out of seven, or 71 percent, graduated. This rose, she said, in 2015-16, to six out of eight students, or 75 percent, graduating.

These figures include, said Michael Bastian, the district’s coordinator for data and information, students who once received but no longer need ENL services.

Two years ago, Jeanne Beattie, spokeswoman for the State Education Department, told The Enterprise that the graduation rate for English learners statewide stood at 31 percent.