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Albany
Over the past decade, the number of students learning to speak English in the Albany City School District has soared from 300 to 1,300.
Much of the growth has come in just the past year, with 364 new students arriving since June of last year.
Given the often intense needs of this growing population, which include immigrants and refugees who have come from poverty, war-torn countries and refugee camps, the district is formulating a plan to open a newcomer academy as soon as next fall at the North Albany Academy building on North Pearl Street.
The voluntary, two-year program would target roughly 175 students in grades 7-12 who are new to the school district, and whose English skills are limited enough to warrant extra help and attention. It would cost $420,000 to run in the first year, based on early estimates provided to the board of education Thursday.
Board members and district officials are in the process of planning the 2017-18 budget, which may or may not include the newcomer program depending on how much state aid is approved this budget season and whether a tax increase will be needed or approved by residents.
There is also some confusion over whether the district can use funding set aside in the state budget for community schools on stand-alone programs benefiting English language learners. District officials are awaiting guidance from the State Education Department.
“I’m a bit concerned about that, because we don’t want to use money meant for our persistently struggling schools and divert it to something else,” said board member Jennifer Lange. “Our schools have been struggling for many, many years.”
The state passed new regulations in 2014 requiring school districts to create bilingual programs for any language that’s spoken by 20 or more students in a single grade level. That was a big ask for a district like Albany, where students speak a collective 57 languages, said Thomas Giglio, director of the district’s English as New Language and Refugee Services.
As a result, he and his staff began researching and making plans more than a year ago for a newcomer academy — a place that could serve the intense needs of students while also satisfying the new regulations in a more cost-efficient way.
It takes students with no English skills roughly three to five years to gain a solid command of the language, data show. The younger they are when they begin to learn, the easier it is to pick up on while also keeping up with classes in math, science, social studies and other areas.
But the language barrier, along with the social and emotional baggage many students carry, can be a serious hurdle to academic achievement. Compared to their peers, English language learners are far more likely to score lower on exams, miss class and drop out of school.
In New York, just 26.6 percent of English language learners graduated in 2016 — down 7.2 percentage points from the year before. During his research, Giglio found that a newcomer school model in New York City, however, had managed to graduate 71 percent of its students.
A pilot run of the newcomer academy launched last summer and serving 140 students in Albany also yielded positive results: 97 percent of families surveyed afterward reported they would like to see the program continue.
Giglio’s hope is that a permanent newcomer academy in Albany would help students adjust to their new environment while gaining enough language skills to follow along once they return to their assigned school. Families would also be kept together, with siblings of different ages able to attend the same school upon arrival to their new country.
In its first year, the program would require four new full-time employees and a dozen others who would transfer from elsewhere in the district. By its second year, the program would cost $328,000, with $139,700 of that cost set aside for an assistant director of ENL and Refugee Services.
Grades 3-5 would be added, and a stand-alone class for 18- to 21-year-olds would launch to provide older immigrant and refugee students with the skills needed to transition to adulthood, even if they’re unable to earn a high school diploma over a three-year period.
“In the end it will come down to what we can afford to do and how the board chooses to allocate our available funds,” said district spokesman Ron Lesko. “Based on the governor’s proposed budget, our ability to add the new programs and services we believe are most important to meet our students’ needs could be limited.”
bbump@timesunion.com • 518-454-5387 • @bethanybump
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