Timothy Hogan, the lawyer for plaintiffs in the long-running Flores v. Arizona court case concerning ELLs, filed a motion in the U.S. District Court in Tucson last Friday, asking the federal court to stop implementation of the state’s mandates for school districts to establish a new kind of program for ELLs this coming school year because the mandates aren’t adequately funded, according to a May 2 Associated Press article.
Meanwhile, Tom Horne, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, is quoted as saying that Mr. Hogan doesn’t care about ELLs because he’s trying to halt implementation of the new programs in which schools must provide four hours of English-language-development instruction to ELLs each day.
I wrote an article about how the state plans to distribute $40.6 million in additional funds for ELLs, which appears in this week’s Education Week. School administrators who aren’t slated to receive any extra funding aren’t very happy about how the money is expected to be distributed, but supporters of the distribution formula say that it’s applied consistently across school districts, so they say the federal court should accept it.
For more about the four-hour programs, see my earlier post, “What’s in Store for Arizona ELLs?”