“It’s a difficult decision anytime that we have to make decisions especially when staffing and money are involved. All those things are finite and to put in one place is to take from another and that’s always hard,” Superintendent Curtis Null said.
How we got here
The program first began in the 2016-17 school year when English-speaking students and Spanish-speaking students began together in kindergarten. Since then, the program has been active at seven campuses including Lamar, Patterson and Oak Ridge elementary schools.
“Almost all of our program has opened past their feeder zones; for example, Patterson and the Anderson combination, that is the entire Conroe feeder, Caney Creek for the entire Creighton feeder and Lamar has all the south county feeders,” Deputy Superintendent Bethany Medford said.
Information in the agenda packet states enrollment in the program has continued to decline beginning in the third grade despite the district's efforts. In addition to enrollment, there has been difficulty in recruiting teachers, not enough planning time for the existing teachers in the program and a need for better development of the required curriculum, Medford said.
Medford presented to the board an enrollment chart of each of the dual language campuses versus the bilingual enrollment in the same campus. The total enrollment difference was 292 for emergent bilingual and 218 for monolingual/dual language.
Digging deeper
The discussion on the possibility of discontinuing the program first began back in December during the Dec. 3 workshop meeting. When discussing the budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year, the dual language program was an estimated expenditure of $1.4 million.
“Going through the process with Dr. Medford and her team, we thought we were going to make a $15 million adjustment. We did identify some things on the expenditure side of our budget that we could move that would have little to no impact on our campuses,” Chief Financial Officer Karen Garza said at the December workshop.
A possibility of ending the program would have allowed the district to instead address the bilingual teacher shortage by filling those positions. The shortage of bilingual teachers has led to less funding from the state due to not enough staffing, Medford said.
Currently, the district has nine openings for bilingual teachers, and there are 31 teachers with emergency permits who have not been bilingual certified yet. Another 30 teachers are on an exemption report and are not certified for the district to meet the requirement for teachers who have been reported to the Texas Education Agency.
The following is the funding impact for the bilingual program:
- 2024-25 school year: $2.8 million in salaries for 36 teachers
- $200,000 loss in bilingual funding due to monolingual teachers
- Estimated general budget savings if the program was eliminated: $1.2 million
- Estimated yearly growth for the 2026-27 school year: $318,000
- “There’s nothing to be more proud of than the children who walked up here tonight. When people talk about the future and people ask where’s the future, the future is really bright because they stood up here tonight and we heard them talk,” Null said.
- “I love the environment in the dual language program because all of the teachers are very nice and have incredible teaching algorithms and skills. This can help children by letting them learn easier and quicker strategies. On top of that, the dual language program allows students of both languages to help each other. This is amazing because when you are fully introduced to the language it helps you learn the language faster and better," CISD student Penelope Bachmeyer said.
- “Students start their journey with me in kindergarten [and] get to see so many beautiful transformations from the start. I get to start with kids who know little to no Spanish or English and by the end of May their level of language acquisition is astonishing and shows this really works,” Brenda Yanez, a Lamar Elementary dual language teacher, said.
