The Vermont Consortium for Language and Academics (VCLA) is designed to address the urgent need of Vermont school districts to increase their capacity to address the NCLB-mandated educational requirements of English Language Learners.
The Consortium will drive three major efforts to help VT school districts meet this challenge:
a) the VCLA Teacher Education Program,
b) the VCLA Professional Development Program, and
c) the VCLA Inter-Regional Network and support website.
Vermont ELL enrollment has grown more than 70% in the last decade. ELLs constitute the most rapidly growing segment of the statewide school population. This population is no longer located in the central magnet areas of Burlington and Barre, and many school districts are finding themselves charged with educating this unique population while lacking the capacity and infrastructure to do so effectively. This challenge has sparked several creative solutions: hiring one teacher to cover an entire district, creating two or more part-time ELL teaching positions in adjacent districts and hiring non-certified tutors when no other options proved feasible. However, even those creative solutions may no longer be sufficient to address the newly-clarified needs of ELLs, as defined by the NCLB regulations.
The passage of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act brings ELLs to the same standards of academic accountability as all children in U.S. schools, and within a sharply-defined time frame, and accentuates the challenges already faced by schools struggling to teach English and academic content simultaneously. NCLB has urgent implications both for ESL teachers, who must now align their teaching with state standards for academic content, and for content teachers, who must now align their content teaching with the language level of their ELLs, defined by new state standards for English language proficiency. Under the pressure of current federal legislation, school districts can no longer separate ESL from regular content teaching. With ELLs representing such a rapidly-growing segment of the statewide school population and with the pressure to help students meet content-related standards as soon as possible, all teachers need training in ESL strategies.