Indian Prairie School District 204 is seeing rapid growth in the number of students who qualify for language services, officials told the district’s Board of Education recently.
In the last 10 years, the number of students who qualify for language services has increased by over 3,000 despite the district’s total student population falling by around the same amount, according to a presentation given by Director of English Language Learner Services Rafael Segarra and English Language Learner Coordinator Traci Wiegel.
Now, the district has over 4,200 students in the program, the presentation showed.
Just 2.5% of Indian Prairie School District 204’s students qualified for language services in the 2005-06 school year, but during the 2024-25 school year, that number has risen to 15.8%, Wiegel said during the presentation.
That’s getting close to the state average of 16.4% of students who need language services, she said.
About a third of the increase has happened since 2020, with around 1,000 more students qualifying for language services in the 2024-25 school year than they did in the 2021-22 school year, the presentation showed.
The district’s English Language Learning Program has two parts: English as a Second Language, which is often shortened to ESL, and bilingual education, Segarra said during the presentation.
The ESL portion of the program is for students who attend a school where less than 20 students need language services within a certain language group, he said.
According to the district’s website, the goal of the ESL program is to develop English skills while still learning the content they would in their grade. The program looks to develop both social and academic language across listening, speaking, reading and writing, the website says.
Schools with 20 or more students who need language services within the same language group are required by the state to provide bilingual services.
Like the ESL program, this Transitional Bilingual Education program looks to teach students English and grade-appropriate content, but it also provides native language instruction and support while transitioning to English, according to the district’s website.
Although it used to be a much smaller number years ago, 22 of the district’s 34 schools now qualify for the bilingual program, Segarra said.
Those schools include Prairie Preschool, Brookdale Elementary, Brooks Elementary, Cowlishaw Elementary, Georgetown Elementary, Gombert Elementary, Kendall Elementary, Longwood Elementary, McCarty Elementary, Owen Elementary, Peterson Elementary, Steck Elementary, Watts Elementary, Welch Elementary, White Eagle Elementary, Fischer Middle, Granger Middle, Hill Middle, Scullen Middle, Still Middle, Metea Valley High and Waubonsie Valley High schools, according to the presentation.
Of those schools, 11 offer bilingual education in a language other than Spanish.
In addition to an increase in the number of students who need language services, the district is also seeing an increase in the number of languages spoken in the district, according to the presentation.
In the 2021-22 school year, around 109 languages were spoken throughout the district, but that number has risen to 126 this year, the presentation showed. These languages represent all students in the district, not just those who need language services, Wiegel said.
While Spanish is the top language spoken by students needing language services, which is 986 students, that number has actually gone down slightly since last school year, the presentation showed.
The district is, however, seeing notable increases in the number of students in the English Language Learning Program who speak Russian, Uzbek and Ukrainian, according to Wiegel.
The presentation showed that almost 100 more Russian-speaking students are enrolled in the program over last year, while Uzbek saw an increase of 50 students and Ukrainian saw an increase of almost 25 students.
As the number of students enrolled in the English Language Learning Program has increased over the past four years, the number of district staff dedicated to the program has risen at a slower rate, according to the presentation.
The district had 90 staff members for the program in the 2021-22 school year; now, it has just over 110 full-time equivalent positions, the presentation showed.
In fact, the district has slightly less full-time equivalent positions than it did last year because Segarra rearranged some staff across the district to provide as many services as possible without impacting the budget, he said.
“We are doing the best job we can with our kids based on what is available in terms of our resources,” he said.
However, the number of students who need language services is growing daily, and caseloads are growing faster than is feasible for staff to handle, according to Wiegel.
Based on staffing, the average caseload is around 56 students per teacher, she said.
To increase the amount of time that teachers have with students, the department is looking for ways to decrease paperwork, Segarra said. An outside company is being considered to help with this problem, he said.
The department is also looking at ways to use grant funds to hire more staff, but it is struggling to find certified teachers in languages like Russian, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Telugu and Arabic, according to the presentation.
Weigel said the department is looking to hire teacher assistants who speak those languages to help, but “clearly the support from a teaching assistant is not the same as the support from a certified teacher.”
In addition to needing more teachers, the department’s administrative team is also “well understaffed” compared to other departments in the district and in neighboring districts, according to the presentation.
Another challenge for the department is that some buildings do not have enough space for language services to work effectively, the presentation stated.
Some schools have very large populations but small spaces, forcing teachers to only meet with six or eight students at a time, which limits instructional time, Weigel said. However, the recently passed $420 million bond referendum may help this situation, she said.
Despite challenges with staffing levels and instructional spaces, students are exiting the program because of their English proficiency level at much higher rates than the state average, the presentation showed.
In 2024, 575 students exited the program, which is a 16.7% exit rate, Weigel said. The state’s exit rate was 6.2% in 2024, she said.
While the exit rate is great, the percentages sometimes dip year-to-year because the number of students who need language services is growing, according to Segarra.
Weigel said the demographics of the program are also changing as the district sees more and more “newcomers,” which are students who were born outside of the U.S. and arrived here within the last year or two.
To help these students and their parents, the district formed a Newcomers Committee last year, Segarra said. Because of that committee, the district now has a guide for newcomers, which is set to soon be published in Spanish and Russian, along with professional development and a toolkit for general education teachers, he said.
However, most of the students who need language services were born in the continental U.S., according to Segarra. The presentation showed that the district currently has over 2,400 students in the English Language Learning Program that were born in the U.S.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
