Influx of New Students Can Outpace Teacher Preparation
But Training Programs Don’t Always Find a Receptive Audience
Trina M. Johnson, who has lived her whole life in this one-stoplight town surrounded by watermelon and cotton fields, turned to a university more than 100 miles north of here when she wanted to get certified to teach English as a second language.
Jesse De Leon, who settled in this part of rural Missouri a decade ago, enrolled in the same university—Southeast Missouri State, or SEMO, in Cape Girardeau—when he decided to upgrade his job as a school paraprofessional to become a certified ESL teacher.
But, even as this region in the American heartland sees an unrelenting influx of students from outside the United States, mostly from Mexico, Ms. Johnson and Mr. De Leon are exceptions: By and large, teachers in the southeastern corner of Missouri known as the Bootheel have been slow to seek out added training to...
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