There is no skill that one can give to another person that is more powerful than language.
As a former ESOL teacher, Robert Gouthro knows firsthand that when non-English speaking students, and their families, learn how to speak English, it impacts all other areas of their education, including their ability to participate in science, English/language arts, physical sports and extracurricular clubs and activities.
“No matter what they end up doing in life, the skills that we teach them are going to have a life-changing impact,” Gouthro said. “That’s why I love the work that we do in this program.”
Gouthro is the K-12 ESOL Coordinator for Berkeley County School District. As the district continues to grow and see more English-learners, BCSD remains committed to making sure all of its students are college and career-ready.
Doing so means implementing new English language learner (ELL) strategies and initiatives to make sure every child in the district is represented and supported.
Multilingual learners
Gouthro has always enjoyed traveling and experiencing different cultures.
He had some formative experiences in high school and college where he got to study abroad, and he recalled a particular time when he was studying in Germany with very limited language skills – even though he was participating in an advanced-level immersion program.
“I was sitting in classrooms and with families who were expecting an advanced German speaker, and I was not,” he said.
Gouthro said this was very much a “lightbulb” moment because he realized: this is what it is like for English-learning students in American schools.
“Having gone through that experience and seeing what it was like, that gave me both the empathy and the motivation to come back and work with our English-learners,” he said.
Gouthro has a Master’s Degree in teaching English as a second language. He has taught at elementary, middle and high school levels, and has also done some adjunct work through different college teaching preparation programs.
Gouthro’s current role as the K-12 ESOL Coordinator for BCSD is an important one, as South Carolina has seen one of the greatest rates of increase in the multilingual learner population out of all the other states in the nation over the last 10 years.
“We are growing way faster than the average state in the nation – we’re actually in the top five in the nation,” he said. “That’s why this is a critical need.”
The Greenville and lowcountry areas of South Carolina in particular have seen huge demographic changes. Gouthro said Berkeley County has grown from having about 20 ESOL teachers to almost 70 ESOL teachers.
Berkeley County School District is a pretty diverse district with about 40 different languages represented, and it particularly has a large number of Spanish-speaking students; recent numbers show about 3,500 students who speak Spanish.
Students in the ESOL program are considered multilingual learners; these are students who come from a bilingual or multilingual home. Some of them are immigrant children, but about 60 percent of them in BCSD are native-born U.S. citizens who come from a bilingual/multilingual family.
“These students are wonderful students – they’re great to work with, but they do have a lot of critical needs that require specialized training and support in order to be as successful as our native-speaking students in the classroom,” Gouthro said.
A new coach and family liaison have been added to the BCSD staff this year to help set these multilingual students up for success.
New roles
The district filled two brand new roles this year: the first is an ESOL instructional coach who works directly with ESOL teachers and general education teachers to make sure the district is providing the latest professional development, strategies and support. The new coach for BCSD is Ashley Snider.
“I learned that I really enjoy building relationships with classroom teachers and helping (them) meet the needs of our multilingual learners, so when this job came up I thought it would be a perfect fit,” she said.
Snider will help with curriculum and instruction and also provides professional development for teachers to implement those strategies. She covers all the schools in the district and works closely with all the ESOL teachers.
“My professional goal is to help teachers, both on the ESOL team and in the general education classrooms, feel more confident in meeting the needs of our multilingual learner population,” she said.
Snider said the most rewarding part of her job is visiting the schools and seeing how well students are doing in their classes. She also recently popped in at Goose Creek High and Goose Creek Elementary’s Hispanic Heritage Night events, which were both held the same night, on Oct. 6.
Snider recalled the high school had student ambassadors who wore t-shirts that read things like “I speak Portuguese” and “I speak Spanish.”
“Students who come in (as) English learners, they might struggle at some point, but they have so much potential to where they can be a student ambassador and set an example for other students and family members – and the community,” she said.
The district has also hired a new Spanish/English bilingual family liaison who works at the district level and works to help interface between schools and families; Andrea Faulk fills that role.
Her job is to bridge the gap and connect families and schools and their communities. She helps families find resources within the community – things like literacy projects, story times, or technology workshops. She will also assist teachers on communicating with parents, and help teachers/staff present workshops that they want multilingual families to understand.
“I think my first goal is simply establishing positive relationships with the teachers and families in the multilingual community so everyone feels supported,” she said.
Faulk said she also wants to help educate families on some technology tools that could be helpful to them, particularly in the district’s Title 1 schools.
“We want to focus on literacy initiatives within schools too, and I will be helping some schools with the Latino Family Literacy Project,” she said.
Faulk said she is happy that she can serve these families, but also wishes there were more district liaisons to provide even more support.
“I love having a supportive team,” she said. “Our division encourages me, promotes teamwork, gives positive praise, and works hard to encourage us to keep going. I love how appreciative schools are when I show up to help their families, too.”
Gouthro cannot speak officially about any new roles being added, but said this demographic change that the area is seeing is definitely accelerating, not slowing down. Roughly 12 percent of the district population is multilingual learner students, current or former.
“Not only is the district growing, but our multilingual learner population is growing faster than our district population,” he said.
Immersion pilot
One new initiative that Gouthro is particularly excited about is a new dual language immersion program.
A dual language immersion program means 50 percent of the students in the class are native English speakers and the other half of the class speaks a different first language. In the case of College Park Elementary, this pilot dual language immersion program is taking place in a first-grade classroom where half of the students speak Spanish.
The class is taught half in Spanish, half in English each day. Gouthro said the hope is to advance this program to include a second grade class next year and a third grade class the following year, with the current class of first-graders sticking together all through their elementary experience.
Gouthro said the idea is that by the end of the program a couple years from now, the English speakers in the class will be somewhat fluent in Spanish while the Spanish-speaking students will have fluency in English.
“The whole time, they will have the cultural opportunity to engage on an equal footing with students of the other language group,” Gouthro said, adding, “It changes…the students’ perspective on language and education, and it helps both groups come out as bicultural, bilingual citizens of the world.”
Gouthro would like to advance the program across the entire school, and create an integrated feeder pattern where English-speaking students will be academically fluent in Spanish by the time they head to College Park Middle, and vice-versa for the Spanish-speaking students.
“If that’s successful, we’re hoping to advance that program model to some other schools around the district as well,” he said.
The first grade immersion class at College Park Elementary is being led by Carla Hogue.
“Carla is awesome – she is exactly the perfect person to pilot this program for us,” Gouthro said.
To prepare for the program, BCSD administrators met with the state department and did site visits with other districts who are trying out the dual immersion program; they interviewed teachers and program managers and then decided to bring it to Berkeley County.
“It was the neatest thing to be in a class and see the students going back and forth between those two languages,” Gouthro said.
Check out more about the immersion program happening at College Park Elementary (story by Mia Grimm).
Further support
Something Gouthro particularly liked about working as an ESOL teacher was the diversity he had in his classrooms.
“I had the world in my classroom,” he said. “There were times when I had 25 students in a high school classroom and I had 14 countries or languages represented in that classroom."
“For me, having the world in my class, and you have to teach those students to be bicultural American citizens, is just a joy,” he added.
BCSD has many other ongoing initiatives to further support its multilingual students. The district has its Title 3 federal grant, which supports multilingual numbers. The district runs different projects with help from that grant. One is a summer grant specific for multilingual learners, where the district invites about 200 high-need learners to come to a three-week camp during the summer to work with ESOL teachers on language development and class enrichment.
Gouthro said the district also does some neat things with community partners. The district does a yearly program with the Charleston River Dogs, where the team provides reading incentives for students and sends out Spanish-speaking players to meet with students at the schools. The players will talk to them about setting goals and how important it is to keep reading.
The district has a similar initiative through Berkeley Electric Cooperative. The cooperative recently did a College Night in conjunction with the Charleston Battery soccer team where they provided high school students with free tickets to a game. At the game, the students met different college recruiters and talk about different opportunities for multilingual students at the college level.
“We have a lot of different little community initiatives like that,” Gouthro said. “We’re grateful for those community partnerships and the way the community has kind of wrapped their arms around the students in our program.”
The pandemic created many challenges when it came to allowing families inside schools for special events. Gouthro said the district is trying to get multilingual families more involved, so this year it is implementing a family reading program, where bilingual teachers will meet with the families to do a family literacy workshop.
“They’ll read a storybook with the families and then talk about how to read a book with your students, and the kinds of questions you should be asking and things like that,” Gouthro said.
This was further supported over the summer with a bilingual literacy book initiative, where the district sent thousands of books that were printed in Spanish and English so that families would have reading materials for their children during the summer.
Gouthro is excited about this school year and making new connections with the district’s English-learners and their families.
“In South Carolina, we promote what we refer to as a ‘can-do’ attitude, and a can-do attitude is just a reminder that just because a student or a parent is able to say something in English, that there are lots of things that they’re already able to do in Spanish and in English – and to always focus on that as the starting point,” he said.
Gouthro encourages others to always start with a can-do attitude when it comes to inclusion.
“That attitude is enshrined in our whole language program,” he said.