‘It boggles the mind’: CCSD struggles to support English learners
If Lake Elementary School had looked only at the student’s math assessment in English, teachers would have worried about him. But when he took the same exam in Spanish, Principal Paola Elena Zepher said, he “blew it out of the water.”
That was the “aha” moment for the new dual language program Zepher and her staff rolled out this year, in which 42 kindergarteners attend school one day in English and the next in Spanish. Thirty-six percent of the school’s population are English learners, and 6 percent of the students are newcomers.
“We realized that these kiddos come to us with such skills,” Zepher said. “Being able to look at the assets that they come to us with, instead of looking at it like a deficit, has really changed our teacher mindset.”
Lake Elementary School is one of only three schools in the Clark County School District to offer a dual language program. That makes CCSD — the fifth-largest school district in the country, with 16 percent of students classified as English learners — an outlier among urban districts. In the rest of the country, dual language programs are on the rise, with 3,600 programs in public schools as of 2022, according to a survey conducted by the American Council for International Education.
Research shows that dual language programs not only increase proficiency for English learners but also help native English speakers become bilingual. CCSD instead uses a full English immersion strategy and consistently has low proficiency rates for all of its students, with especially significant gaps for English learners.
“It boggles the mind sometimes,” UNLV Professor of Multilingual Education Alain Bengochea said. “This is an international city. People are coming from all over the place. We cater to different industries and different folks that we encounter. I just wish that we would move in that direction, or find ways to be more multilingual in our approaches. Because a monolingual lens is not going to be supportive of everybody.”
Full immersion
Although CCSD once offered more dual language programs, nearly all of those programs have been phased out. Across the district, schools teach fully in English.
“Because we teach in English, we assess in English. It’s just that our students have to catch up with two different things: content and language development,” CCSD’s English Language Learners Department Assistant Superintendent Erick Casallas said.
The school district’s 2023 data shows that English language learners in third through fifth grades had a 17.5 proficiency rate in reading English compared with 40.1 percent for native speakers. English proficiency declines in higher grades: Reading proficiency for English learners is 5.1 percent for sixth through eighth grades, compared with 37.9 percent in total.
Among all grade levels, only 7.1 percent of English learners in the district demonstrated proficiency on the English Language Proficiency Assessment.
Miriam Benitez, who served as CCSD’s English language learner program director in the 2013-2014 school year and was the district’s dual language coordinator from 2007 to 2010, said a lack of consistent leadership and resources led to the number of dual language programs dwindling in the district.
“I don’t know that they necessarily don’t agree with it, or aren’t on board with it, as much as they don’t really have the personnel to run it,” she said.
In 2022, the district rolled out a dual language immersion pilot in select schools, which it said could “build a foundation and develop potential model schools.”
“Expanding dual language immersion is contingent on the availability of bilingual-certified teachers,” the district wrote in a statement.
Opposing research
While costs of dual language programs are a high level of concern for school districts, research shows that such programs are not always as expensive as expected.
Jennifer Steele, a professor in the School of Education at American University with some of the most-cited research on dual language programs, said that in focus groups schools often raised hiring and costs as an impediment to dual language teaching. However, in a 2018 study in Utah, she and other researchers found dual language programs relatively inexpensive to operate. The Utah State Board of Education estimated an additional 1 percent of spending per dual language pupil, or $72, including school incentives, teacher training and curriculum.
Utah also made purchasing curriculum a priority so teachers were not tasked with developing it themselves.
Another solution, Steele said, is building a strong connection to a partner university to train teachers — something teachers at Lake were able to take advantage of through UNLV.
CCSD allocated millions of dollars to support UNLV’s Project Pueblo, a master’s degree program that gives an endorsement in English language instruction. UNLV will continue the program through the Nevada TEACH grant and educate 50 people per year. Lake Elementary School teachers were able to get certified for free as the school began dual language programs, Zepher said.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto visited UNLV’s Project Pueblo in August and called it a “model program.” She has proposed a bill with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, to create a competitive grant program to fund partnerships between institutions of higher education and high-need school districts for job training programs for English language educators. The Nevada senator told the Las Vegas Review-Journal she hoped her legislation would create incentives for colleges and schools to support English learners.
“We are really seeing a challenge in Nevada,” Cortez Masto said, noting she sees “an essential need” to address the issue.
Dual language research
In 2017, Steele and her fellow researchers found that in Portland, Oregon, public schools, students who won entrance to a dual language program through a lottery system were seven to nine months ahead in reading. By sixth and seventh grades, lottery winners’ probabilities of remaining classified as English learners were 3 to 4 percentage points lower than those not in dual language programs.
The study also shows how dual language programs help native English speakers, as bilingualism has shown cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention control.
“Families like it because it gives kids a chance to learn languages when their brains are young, and communities like it because it provides access to the partner language for bilingual learners or kids whose home language is not English. So it’s kind of a pro-equity approach,” Steele said.
The study found that even students whose native language did not match the partner language of the program benefited from dual language programs — a critical fact for CCSD, where Tagalog, the language spoken in the Philippines, ranks second after Spanish.
In Utah, which rolled out dual immersion across the state in 2008, served 10 percent of schools by the time of research. Research showed that native Spanish speakers in dual language classes were 15 points further ahead than expected, which Steele called a medium-to-large educational effect.
Success was higher for schools with at least 40 percent native Spanish speakers, where the average schoolwide achievement in English, math and science was up 6 percent to 9 percent. Contrary to the study in Portland, Spanish speakers in Utah performed better than people who spoke other native languages — which Steele said was likely due to the fact that Utah was not as diverse in languages, and had mostly Spanish speakers.
Dual language programs here
Lake’s program started at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, less than a year after Zepher attended a conference for the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents in October 2023. In session after session, she heard one common thread: the benefits of dual language programs for English language learners.
When Zepher first asked the teachers at Lake if they would be interested in participating in a dual language program, she said several of them were in tears of joy. Many of them told her that they still remembered being newcomers and that helping these students was why they had become a teacher.
Since starting the program, she has not only seen higher math scores, but also a confidence shift. For the first time, the Spanish speakers get to be the experts.
“The Spanish kids struggle when they go to English class, and the English kids struggle when they go to Spanish class,” Zepher said.
Strong Start Academy, a Nevada charter school, also offers a dual language program, and has shown the highest rates possible in the WIDA assessments, which test for English proficiency.
The schools teach thematically — a class on endangered animals, for instance, is taught in both English and Spanish.
“If there’s any gaps or holes in the one language, there’s opportunity to pick it up when they’re hearing a related lesson in the other language,” Principal Miriam Benitez said.
Administrators at both schools also said that dual language programs have increased family engagement, a key component of successful English language learning.
“You read about all these best practices and how it’s supposed to work, and then you see it in action every day. It’s just such a beautiful thing to see both sides benefiting,” Benitez said.
Contact Katie Futterman at kfutterman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ktfutts on X and @katiefutterman.bsky.social.