UCO program, grant to aid state’s secondary teachers

This grant will be used to train secondary school ESL teachers. Many older students enroll in school here and there is a shortage of teachers to teach them English. DP

By Courtney Bryce, Special to The Sun

Edmondsun.com: The University of Central Oklahoma’s College of Education and Professional Studies strives to make a difference in the lives of English learning students in secondary metropolitan schools.

The Office of English Language Acquisition of the U.S. Department of Education recently awarded the college a $1.3 million grant to fund Project SEEDS (Supporting Excellent Education for Diverse Students). The grant will be disbursed during the course of the next five years.

“The main thing we’re concentrating on is that immigrants that move here that don’t speak English don’t always start in the first-grade,” said April Haulman of UCO’s Bilingual Language/Teaching English as a Second Language Program.

Haulman said most schools in the metropolitan area have language specialists or bilingual teachers.

“That’s not enough,” she said. “They need teachers that know how to adapt to teach them in the classroom.”

Haulman said the grant will help achieve this by funding training and new curriculum for UCO’s current education teachers so they can better teach their students how to adapt to English language learners. Training modules, materials and course syllabi will be adapted in the first year. Forty teachers will receive materials, coaching and professional implementation during the course of the next five years.
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