A Jenga tower wobbled as a third grader pulled out a wooden block, eagerly turning it to read a question written on one side.

It was the first day of school at Russellville Elementary. Kathy Alfaro, a new English language teacher, used the exercise to help her small class to bond – and to help them learn English. More than a third, or about 200, of the school’s students grew up in homes that didn’t regularly speak English, and Alfaro works with small groups of them throughout the day.

“Where,” the boy read, then slowly sounded out the other words: “Where would you like to visit?”

“Disneyland,” one student said. “Space,” another classmate chimed in. “Guatemala,” said a girl with a bright blue bow.

Alfaro exchanged a few words with the girl in Spanish and then turned to the group.

“Do y’all know what she said?” Alfaro asked the class. “She said she has a lot of family in Guatemala because she was born there. And I told her that I was born here, but I also have a lot of family in Guatemala.”

Franklin County, in north Alabama, is home to one of the state’s largest populations of Mexican and Central American immigrants. Many of them migrated in the early 1990s and now make up about a fifth of Russellville’s population.

More than half of 2,500 students in the small Russellville city school district now identify as Hispanic or Latino, and about a quarter are English language learners, or EL students.

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But the district at times has struggled to find the people and funding necessary to help EL students achieve. It typically takes five years of intensive, small-group instruction, on top of regular classes, to help a student learn English and perform well in a regular classroom.

Russellville leaders now are using an historic amount of COVID relief money to fund a bold experiment. They’re using the temporary funds to hire and certify more local, Spanish-speaking staff, like Alfaro. She was previously a Spanish teacher, but recently took a new role as an ELL teacher.

In addition to helping more local students succeed, Russellville aims to be a model for the rest of the state. As Alabama grapples with teacher shortages, especially in support staff areas, local leaders are hopeful that their results can convince the legislature to support broader efforts to fund and certify more EL staff.

“We were trying to teach an increasing number of EL students with predominantly white teachers that speak English,” said Superintendent Heath Grimes. “And I’m like, ‘Why are we not using resources that we have in our community?’”

Adding staff

As a group, English language learners performed lower on language proficiency tests during the pandemic. Experts say that may be because many students lacked access to virtual resources at home, or because schools struggled to transfer in-person EL help to remote environments.

But Russellville appears to be bucking that trend.

Districtwide, the percentage of students who met their language proficiency goals increased from 46% in 2019 to 61% in 2022. At the two elementary schools, proficiency jumped by nearly 30 percentage points.

“We’ve never seen a number like that before,” said Grimes, who credits new EL teachers in the district, as well as seven new EL aides at West Elementary, for the boost.

COVID relief money allows Russellville Elementary School to support Alfaro’s role, where she now is one out of three EL staffers. Previously, state funding would only have supported one English language teacher, said Russellville Elementary’s Principal Tiffany Warhurst.

Together, they join about 20 other EL educators, aides and translators in the district – nearly half of whom are funded with COVID money.

At West Elementary across the street, Elizabeth Alonzo is settling into her second year as an EL aide. It’s a role that she said she didn’t expect to be in – mostly because there were few bilingual teachers in her school growing up, but also because she didn’t think she had the qualifications to help teach.

Like a couple of other staff members, Alonzo is currently finishing coursework through a teacher training program called Reach University, which is contracting with an increasing number of Alabama districts to help certify more local staff.

The school now assigns aides to just a couple of teachers throughout the school year, so that they have time to build relationships with students. Alonzo typically spends that time working with small groups of students or translating assignments.

“Whenever I started kindergarten, I didn’t know a word of English, so I struggled a lot,” she said, noting that an older cousin would often have to come to her class to translate what her teacher was saying.

“That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do this, because I want to help those students.”

A statewide need, and response

State funding for English language programs is limited, but growing. The state legislature approved an initial $2.9 million for schools with large EL populations in 2018, and that amount grew to $16 million last year.

Leaders at the Alabama State Department of Education say they’re supportive of the increase, and now are asking for more room in this year’s budget for EL specialists and regional coordinators, who can help connect schools with more resources.

“We want to make sure that if students come to this country, if they’re not able to read, that they learn to read quickly and in English,” said State Superintendent Eric Mackey. “We’re going to continue to invest in that, because it’s our belief that every child deserves a high quality education.”

While the state funding formula attempts to account for the money needed to adequately educate EL students, advocates say funding still often falls short, especially in rural districts that struggle to fund schools.

“It takes a lot more money to educate a child that does not speak your language,” said Rep. Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville, who has been working with district leaders to put more money toward EL students in the state budget.

Some of the nation’s largest districts, according to the Education Trust, used pandemic relief money to hire bilingual staff. But as schools prepare for post-pandemic budget cuts, experts and advocates warn against reducing support for EL programs and other interventions.

“Our overreliance on federal funds and temporary funds potentially demonstrates that we’re not doing enough as a state already,” said Carlos Alemán, director of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama. “As we see those dollars wind down, then the state should really reflect and review what it can do to make sure that these programs can remain in place.”

Next steps

State leaders have cautioned school districts against using federal COVID money for long-term expenses, like salaries. But Russellville leaders are holding out, hopeful that their effort to invest in EL staff will lead to statewide change.

“I don’t think it was a risk. I think it was a test,” Kiel said. “There is an appetite in the legislature to put more bodies in the classroom. If we’re going to fund something, I think we’ve proven that it’s not just about people that can’t speak the language. It’s about all students perform better if there are warm bodies in the classroom.”

Grimes is working on ways to sustain those roles. But in the meantime, he’s preparing for lots of change.

The district will only be able to keep three or four aides, he said – maybe two each at the elementary schools. And he would lose them in the middle and high school. They’d keep the EL coach, even though she may have to go into another role. And they would also lose one or two EL teachers.

“When that goes away after two years, that’s what our fear is,” said Warhurst, the elementary principal. “…That all that will be lost.”

Trisha Powell Crain contributed to this story.

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This story is part of a national collaboration between Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News in Texas, The Fresno Bee in California, The Hechinger Report, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Alabama Education Lab team at AL.com is supported through a partnership with Report for America, a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.