Principal Diane Campbell is extremely proud of how well students
at Gabilan Hills Elementary School are excelling in the transition
from Spanish to English.
Principal Diane Campbell is extremely proud of how well students at Gabilan Hills Elementary School are excelling in the transition from Spanish to English.
“Things are improving greatly at our site and districtwide,” she said.
Like those at Gabilan Hills, students in the rest of the Hollister School District and the entire county vastly improved their scores on the 2003 California English Development Test. The state released the CELDT results last week.
The CELDT, tests all California ELL students, and tracks their progress of learning the English language. The test was given between July and October of 2003 to all students raised in homes where Spanish is the first language spoken.
Students are tested in three different categories: listening/speaking, reading and writing. They are then scored on a scale ranging from beginning, early intermediate, intermediate, early advanced and advanced.
San Benito High School Superintendent Jean Burns Slater said early advanced is the percentage that really shows improvement.
“When students get to the early advanced stage, it’s a sign that they’ve learned the English language,” Slater said.
SBHS saw a huge increase in its early advanced group, bringing its 2002 score of 19 percent up to 49 percent for 2003.
“We know we’re going to be tested, so we’re constantly upgrading the curriculum and the scores keep getting better every year,” Slater said.
Scores also improved at Hollister School District’s middle schools. Among the eighth-graders, 47 percent scored in the early advanced category, compared to only 31 percent in 2002.
Hollister School District as a whole raised its early advanced score from 18 percent to 26 percent.
Gabilan Hills Elementary School educates a large group of ELL students in the district. Out of the 667 students enrolled, 285 of them are ELL students.
Campbell commends the hard work of the staff and members of the district for the success of the ELL program at her school.
“We’ve seen such tremendous growth,” Campbell said. “I’m also very proud that all of the teachers at this school who work with ELL students have been certified or received extra training in order to be prepared.”
Hollister School District has created and continues to work on the ELL Master Plan. Some of the changes have been more reading time required of the students. Kindergartners are required to read for 30 minutes a day, and the upper grades read for 45 minutes. Campbell said the students are also being put in labs to study during their normal classes as well. HSD ELL Coordinator Lana Martinez was unavailable for comment, but Campbell said everyone is working hard, and these test results show their efforts are working.
“There is so much going on right now to make our program better and better,” she said. “We’ve held meetings at night, and we’re doing research in a concise way, and we can really see when our students are ready to transition from Spanish to English.”
Aromas/San Juan Unified went up only 1 percent in the early advanced category, but it saw a 3-percent increase in the advanced category.
State Superintendent Jack O’Connell said in a statement released last week, he is very impressed with the progress of the state.
“The positive results of this year’s CELDT indicate that California’s standards-based instruction is working for all our students,” O’Connell said. “As English learners attain higher levels of English proficiency, they are more likely to reach higher levels of academic achievement. These results provide more evidence that we must stay the course with our high standards and accountability program in California.”
For more information about the test or to find out how all the schools in the county did, visit http://celdt.cde.ca.gov.
