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In 2020-2021, only around 20% of Syracuse City School District elementary schoolers reached a proficient score in the New York State Regents Exam’s English Language Arts section. But the state’s standardized test only covers one of 74 different languages represented by students across SCSD schools.

As of 2021 SCSD comprises over 18,000 students and serves the city of Syracuse’s four neighborhoods, all of which having highly-concentrated refugee populations. Since the year 2000, Syracuse has brought in over 10,000 refugees.

With the influx, educational environments serving the city’s population have seen a boom in linguistic diversity among children in public city schools.

Among the 74 languages in SCSD, common spoken languages include Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Dari Persian, Drench, Fuluh, Haitian Creole, Karen, Kinyarwanda, Nepali, Oromo, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, Tigrinya and Vietnamese. The district’s student population also represents around 80 different countries of origin.

Currently, New York state schools operate under English as a New Language systems, said Stephanie McMillen, a communications sciences and disorders professor at SU who researches childhood language and literacy development. The system, which includes three tiers for new language facilitation, attempts to tailor intervention responses to a student’s level of need.

The state’s Blueprint for English Language Learner/Multilingual Learner Success, which was added to the New York State Department of Education website in January 2022, outlines ENL requirements for teachers, schools and school districts.

In addition to a collective 74 languages being spoken across SCSD schools, 80 countries of origin for are represented among students who attend schools in the district. Around 10,000 refugees have settled in the city of Syracuse over the last two decades.

Meghan Hendricks | Photo Editor

But because of the long process for achieving government regulations, developments in inclusive education requirements are relatively recent, said George Theoharis, a professor in the Teaching and Leadership department and the coordinator of SU’s Inclusive Early Childhood and Special Education undergraduate program.

He said systems for students with disabilities were established through the courts in the early 1970s, long before language-related accessibility. For non-English speaking families who have historically needed educational resources for children, that path to accommodation didn’t translate, Theoharis said.

“There’s a ton of special ed regulation that had come from case law, because parents sued states, sued districts,” Theoharis said. “If you’re a new family (to the area), even if your kids are not getting the education deserved, it’s really hard to sue states and school districts when English is not your first language, right?”

Theoharis — who also runs SU’s Ed.D. program in educational leadership and the education studies minor​ — said education is now starting to see the same steady incline in inclusivity as disability policy has over the past 50 years. McMillen said that though underfunded Syracuse city schools are making progress in increasing accessibility at the district level.

Often, the responsibility to determine and coordinate the necessary resources for students who are learning English can become discretionary, McMillen said, because it ultimately falls on classroom teachers and ENL instructors.

“What I often see is speech pathologists will say or teachers will say, ‘Oh, they’re dual language learners, they’ll catch up eventually,’” McMillen said. “Then unfortunately, these kids, by the time they’re in third and fourth grade, haven’t caught up. They’re significantly behind their peers.”

For students who speak languages other than English and Spanish, she said a gap in standardized testing is one way responsibilities transfer to instructors. State tests evaluate monolingual English speakers and Spanish-English bilinguals, but there are no commercially-available tests in the U.S. for any other language pairs.

When it comes to standardized testing scores, she said, bilingual children are disproportionately affected by low ELA proficiency on both New York state and U.S. exams. She said because children don’t have the dual language support they need in order to be successful in schools, they’re falling significantly behind their monolingual English-speaking peers.

“But that’s not a consequence of bilingualism,” McMillen said. “That’s a consequence of us — as clinicians, as teachers, as researchers, as people who are involved in children’s lives — not having the resources that we need to effectively identify kids who need additional support and treatment.”

Despite the inaccessibility of state testing, said Carla Ramirez, SU Literacy Corps’ associate director, SCSD intervention specialists and ENL teachers work to help bilingual students perform well on tests like the NYS Regents Exam by focusing time toward learning English outside of traditional classrooms. To Theoharis, the recent shift toward inclusive ENL education means a necessary balance between time spent in the classroom and time in separate spaces with specialists.

Students who are learning English as a new language spend time both in ENL-specific settings and in a traditional classroom. In recent years, SU professor George Theoharis said there’s been a shift toward a more equal balance between the two.

Meghan Hendricks | Photo Editor

Up until the current wave in education inclusion, he said the common practice was to take English-learning students out of typical learning environments, rather than provide the support they need to acquire a new language in their own classroom.

“When I first came (to Syracuse), anytime I would talk about inclusive ESL, people thought I was an alien,” Theoharis said. “Even though there were pockets around the country of people doing that, people had not gotten their heads around that here, even though they’d gotten their heads around including kids with disabilities.”

Theoharis said the integration approach is central to helping students establish connections with peers, and emphasized community as an important aspect of learning a new language. He said committing to diversity as something that enriches a classroom has a practical side, because it helps to actually implement inclusion.

When it comes to areas of language and dialect, McMillen said, teaching practices can significantly impact students’ identities because of how closely tied identity is to language. When assigning Literacy Corps tutors from SU to SCSD classes and students, Ramirez said she tries to pair tutors and students who share a non-English language.

“Being with a group that has the same values, same culture and same language as you helps them build that relationship, also with the community, and build the confidence they need,” Ramirez said.

Arlo Stone | Design Editor

At SU, Theoharis said the undergraduate program in elementary education emphasizes adjusting approaches to fit different needs. Still, in SU’s programs and in the city of Syracuse, McMillen said there’s been a gap in trauma-informed practices when it comes to meeting communication needs of refugees in Syracuse.

McMillen and CSD professor Jamie Desjardins plan to help address that gap through a one-credit course starting in the fall — set to include hands-on experiences like practice with live interpreters — for students going into clinical work like speech pathology. But most importantly, she said, the program is going to center on and be informed by refugees in the community.

When education students leave SU, McMillen and Theoharis both said those graduates will ideally have a vision of teaching that values diversity and prioritizes individual needs and experiences.

“It’s being human-centered, being student-centered, knowing that we’re all trying to come together as people and as humans to be and live and work in an environment where we’re going to need to communicate and connect through language,” McMillen said. “But we’re also going to need to connect through just being people and just being humans living our everyday lives.”

Published on March 2, 2023 at 5:06 am

Contact Jana: jlseal@syr.edu | @JanaLoSeal