The UNM College of Education received a $1 million grant to fund more training for bilingual education teachers in the Gallup-McKinley County School District.
Pat Stall, the college's division director in Gallup, said the U.S. Department of Education Title VII Office of Bilingual Education awarded the five-year grant. She said the grant will fund improved teaching techniques for children with limited English proficiency.
She said that as part of the program, two groups of 20 teachers will pursue graduate degrees with an emphasis on English as a second language and will work on-site in Gallup. The focus of the program will be to determine the effectiveness of the strategies teachers now use in the classroom, she said.
Stall said the grant focuses on Gallup schools because it has a high number of students with limited English proficiency. She said the district has many language, literacy and socioeconomic issues that contribute to lower test scores.
Stall said many students are not fluent in any language because they come from Navajo speaking homes or homes that speak poor English.
"When children reach school you can imagine the difficulty that compounds in not just learning to read but in any subject," she said.
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Stall said another goal is to help teachers become researchers and ensure their continual path of professional development.
Viola Florez, dean of the College of Education, said the extra funding to increase teacher recruitment will improve the quality and retention of teachers in bilingual education.
"The college itself is committed to the quality of preparation across the state," she said. "Having this award is definitely going to assist us in doing the outreach work that we really value."
Florez said those teaching Navajo, Zuni and Spanish speaking children will benefit most from the grant. She said bilingual education is offered in many schools and is needed by children who come from different backgrounds, cultures and languages.
Stall said New Mexico needs bilingual education programs because the state still values native and home languages as precious to culture and belief systems. She said the rest of the country, especially in California where bilingual education was abolished, has different issues to deal with.
"I'd hate to pretend to be in their shoes," she said. "They're trying to educate a lot of migrant children, and I think perhaps their reaction to language could well be more of a reaction toward the strain on the education system."
Stall said New Mexico will begin feeling that strain more with large influxes of immigrants, which Texas and California already have. She added that nothing was wrong with California or Arizona's bilingual education before they passed English-only laws - it was just the political climate concerning the education system itself.
"I don't quarrel with the fact that our school systems are strained," she said. "It's easy to try to get into a survival mode and try to simplify issues that aren't really all that simple."
