News Update

New grants awarded to support bilingual learners

Nine school districts, charter schools and county offices of education were awarded $1.8 million in grants from private funders to improve training for teachers to better serve children learning English in addition to their home languages.

The funding is expected to be used to help develop new bilingual curriculum, or to hire coaches or conduct trainings to support teachers to implement the resources and best practices outlined in the Multilingual Learning Toolkit, developed by a coalition of nonprofit organizations, researchers and in collaboration with the California Department of Education.

“Multilingual children need support now more than ever with the pandemic creating further inequities in their learning experiences,” said Patricia Lozano, Executive Director of the organization Early Edge California, in a press release about the grants. “Let’s build an assets-based approach to teaching multilingual learners as a permanent part of California’s education system.” 

The awardees are Franklin-McKinley School District in San Jose, Fullerton School District, Oakland Unified School District, Salinas City Elementary School District, Semitropic School District, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, a network of charter schools in Los Angeles, the Orange County Department of Education, the San Mateo County Superintendent of Schools, and the Tehama County Department of Education.

The grants were awarded by the Emerging Bilingual Collaborative, a project of the New Venture Fund backed by a coalition of five California-based funders – California Community Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, James B. McClatchy Foundation, Silver Giving Foundation, and Sobrato Philanthropies.

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