In Appalachia, many school districts with little or no experience working with English-language learners have enrolled such students in the past 10 years, says a report about ELLs in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia by the federal Institute of Education Sciences.
Many of those districts initially have taken a piecemeal approach to providing help for such students, the report from the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education says, and they struggle to hire educators with the language skills necessary to communicate with parents and work with the students.
After the first student with limited proficiency in English enrolls in a district, the report points out, the enrollment of such students often grows rapidly in the following years, and school officials need to get up to speed quickly.
