Posted on November 27, 2001 at 12:10 p.m.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — Two grants from the U.S. Department of Education totaling nearly $389,000 will fund two University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Education initiatives to train public school teachers and personnel to work with non-English-speaking children. Both grants will provide training to teachers and school workers, including bus drivers and school counselors, to address academic performance and help ease the sometimes difficult social and cultural transitions.

The first grant totaling about $203,000 will fund “New Teachers for New Students: An English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) Certification Program for Alabama Teachers.”

Through the grant, UAB, in partnership with Kansas State University (KSU), will over the next three years train 50 K-12 school teachers to become ESL certified. Twenty-five will come from the greater Birmingham area. The other half will come from around the state of Alabama. Teachers are now being recruited to begin classes in January.

“The goal is to train more ESL certified teachers as quickly as possible,” said Julia Austin, principal investigator for both grants and director of education services in the UAB Graduate School. “Right now, there are only about 40 certified ESL teachers in the whole state. The other problem is that a lot of the ESL students we’ve trained in Alabama have moved on to other states. Through this program, we can target teachers who have already made a commitment to stay in Alabama.”

The grant also will fund a distance learning program to deliver ESL courses to teachers around Alabama. The program is based on a highly successful ESL distance learning program at KSU. In addition, a “Summer ESL Institute for Teachers at UAB” will be created so teachers can take two intensive ESL courses each year.

The second grant, totaling about $186,000, will fund Project ACCESS, a program to train 75 non-ESL teachers and 45 public school staffers who work with ESL children.

Project ACCESS will train regular classroom teachers to instruct ESL children. Teachers in the program can earn credit toward an ESL certificate. The project also will provide training to non-classroom personnel, including administrators, counselors, office staff and bus drivers in selected public schools on how to deal with the cultural, linguistic and legal issues that often affect ESL students and their families. Workshops will begin in the spring, Austin said.

“The program will help to make school personnel aware of the cultural differences,” Austin said. “Cafeteria workers, for instance, are sometimes unaware that people from some cultures are vegetarians. A bus driver may become offended when a child fails to look him or her in the eye without realizing that looking someone in the eye may be a sign of disrespect in that child’s native country. It’s the simple things that can cause misunderstanding and problems. This program will foster cultural understanding.”

Another component of Project ACCESS will provide stipends to UAB education faculty to integrate issues related to educating ESL students into professional development courses for faculty as well as into the school of education’s secondary methods courses and elementary student-teacher seminars. In addition, UAB faculty will become consultants for the University of Montevallo, Miles College, Samford University and Birmingham-Southern College education faculty who want to incorporate ESL preparation into their courses.

Both grants are designed to help schools meet the Alabama Department of Education’s guidelines requiring public schools to provide equal access to education for the growing number of non-English speaking students. More than 7,260 ESL students were enrolled in Alabama schools in 1999-2000, according to the Alabama Department of Education’s Limited English Proficiency Statistical Report. Nearly 350 were in Jefferson County.