WCSD cuts: District may slash 10 English-language teacher positions to close budget hole

Millions of dollars-worth of budget cuts made by the Washoe County School District could creep back into the classroom for the second year in a row — and this year students still learning English could feel the brunt of the cuts.

This year’s list of cuts, worth a little more than $4 million, are aimed at bringing a ten-year fight with a chronic budget deficit to a near-end. Those cuts include the elimination of ten educators dedicated to teaching the district's thousands of students still learning English.

The ten English-language teachers account for the single-largest line item cut recommended this year, at $682,764. If the proposed cuts are approved, the district's English-language program will ultimately have lost 24 teachers over two consecutive years of budget cuts.

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This year’s cuts would also grow the student-to-teacher ratio in the English-language learning program from 65 students per every teacher, to 70 students per every teacher.

But the proposal is not set in stone.

The school board is expected to approve a tentative budget — which would include the cuts — at a special budget meeting on Tuesday, April 10. It won’t be until June that the budget is made final.

Other budget cuts include increasing middle and elementary school walk zones by a quarter-mile, 2 percent cuts to the school board and superintendent's budgets and eliminating a handful of other district positions.

District staff says eliminating the ten English-language teachers is about more than just the budget deficit. They say it will help make an expensive program more cost-effective, streamlined and inclusive.

The district also appears to be committed to its new plan. For example, when about $1 million in additional funding was discovered after the cuts were proposed, the district decided to save four-and-a-half school counseling jobs instead of the English-language positions.

Trustees felt that cutting school counselors, which are considered an integral piece of keeping schools safe and students mentally sound, was unwise.

But one school board member, and others in Reno’s Hispanic community, say the cuts to the English-language program — and its newly-revised teaching method — will be a detriment to students struggling to understand the language spoken around them, let alone their coursework.

A reorganized program with fewer teachers

District officials say a new teaching method being implemented next year will give students learning English more regular and equitable access to educators with the know-how to help them, despite the teacher cuts.

Chief Academic Officer Debra Biersdorff said the new version of the program will focus more resources on training average classroom teachers to work with students learning English. A “facilitator” assigned up to two, maybe three, campuses will work with teachers, students and be responsible for in-classroom coaching.

Biersdorff said the change has been in the works since last summer, well before this year's budget cuts were proposed.

The program will be more inclusive by keeping students still learning English in their normal classrooms, she said. But also, it’s a plan to cope with the growing number of students in the program each year.

The number of students learning English is growing statewide. This school year, more than a third of Washoe County’s students were in the program.

“As our numbers continue to grow … we don’t have the luxury, we don’t have the means, to keep adding EL teachers,” Biersdorff said, adding that the specially certified English-language teachers are hard to find.

The new program is slated to be rolled out at 30 elementary schools next year, all of which currently share an English-language teacher with another campus.

Inclusive or detrimental? Depends on who you ask

But not everyone is buying into the new plan.

“To hear there is going to be such a cut is devastating,” said 24-year-old Alejandra Hernández Chávez, a graduate of Sparks High School and a product of Washoe County’s English-language program. “The only way I was able to thrive in life and in the future with my education was because I had a good basis of the language.”

Hernández Chávez immigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1999 and came to Reno in 2000. She now works for ACTIONN, a Northern Nevada-based social justice organization.

She entered the English-language program at Echo Loder Elementary School.

“It did its job, because the language stuck really well,” she said.

Hernández Chávez said she spent one to two hours a day learning English with five other kids in a converted classroom “that probably was a closet at some point,” she said with a laugh.

The program worked. After a year, she left and could speak English proficiently.

The key, she said, was she was not alone in her struggle.

“I remember being so desperately afraid,” Hernández Chávez said, remembering stepping on campus the first day. “But I was almost mirrored in my peers and other students who were scared because they couldn’t speak English.”

Her classes were also laser-focused on learning the language, she explained. She’s concerned that regular classroom teachers, who are already charged with a hefty number of responsibilities, may be stretched too thin to give students learning English the attention they need.

Denise López, the executive director of the Democratic Party of Washoe County, is also worried about the changes. She’s also a product of an English-language learning program, though not in Washoe County.

Regardless, she’s concerned about the changes.

López attended a school district in Bronson, Michigan that, at least for the first few years, expected its students still learning English to pick up the language during normal classes.

“The teachers couldn’t communicate with me, that was the first challenge,” she said. “How are they supposed to teach these students when they don’t know how to communicate with them?”

“I didn’t want to go to school because I couldn’t understand anything that the teachers were saying.”

Once López’s school saw an influx of Hispanic students, it implemented a targeted English-language teaching program with specialized instructors for students learning the language. Six months after the change, López said she was speaking English with ease.

López’s experience with in-classroom language learning has given her cause for concern with the proposed changes in Washoe County. She’s worried the complicated needs of these students will be washed out by already existing classroom responsibilities.

But Biersdorff said the change will be good for students who already spend much of their day in regular classrooms.

“Sure, I am concerned about putting more and more on the shoulders of our teachers … but these (English-language) students already are in the classrooms with our teachers and we are a district that very much believes in inclusive education,” Biersdorff said.

“We want these students to be in the classroom with their grade-level peers.”

But there is a money-saving motive, too

While Bierdsorff insists the switch to the new English-language program was conceived without the budget deficit in mind, there is a cost-saving motive to the cuts.

Much of what has been presented to the school board to justify cutting the ten teachers has focused on a cost comparison between what Clark County spends on its English-language program, and what Washoe County spends.

The difference in investment between the two school districts is striking.

Clark County, according to the analysis, spent $187.67 per student in its English-language program in the 2016-17 school year. Washoe, on the other hand, paid $1,296.27 per student in the same year.

Despite spending significantly less, the analysis notes, students learning English in Clark County had a graduation rate nearly as good as Washoe’s.

To those in the district’s financial office, the difference in spending is evidence that Washoe is spending too much money on the program for too little payout.

The analysis was part of a new budget process aimed at measuring “academic return on investment,” where the academic success of a program is measured against the dollars spent to fund it.

The English-language program was the only program this year that was subject to an “academic return on investment” analysis.

But school board member Veronica Frenkel disagrees that the school district is overspending on its program.

Frenkel, who at the age of six had to learn English as a student when her family moved to the U.S. from Chile, is the only Hispanic representative on the school board.

She argues that the revision of the program should not come with cuts to teaching staff. If the district is going to reorganize the program, she says, it should do so while keeping English-language specific teachers in the classroom.

“I believe that we should be increasing our investment in these students, particularly the (English-language) students because they are among the lowest-performing students in our district,” Frenkel said. “That says to me that we need to be doing more to make these students successful.”

State standardized test results from 2017 show only 4 percent of eight-grade students still learning English were proficient in Math, and 8.9 percent of the same students were proficient in reading.

Frenkel has been vocally opposed to the cuts since they were proposed in late February. She’s also openly advocated for cutting administrators and support staff before cutting teachers.

“I’m passionate about maintaining teacher positions that serve our most vulnerable students,” she said. ‘And I am unhappy with suggestions that we should cut teacher positions.”