Putting Policy to Work with Dr. Megan Alubicki-Flick

Tell me a little bit about, right, what does school look like in Connecticut? What does school look like for English learners in Connecticut? And of course, it's gonna vary by [chuckles] county and building, but if there's someone listening like me that I'm not that familiar with what ML education looks and feels like in Connecticut or what your priorities are, tell us a little bit about your state.

Yeah.

Connecticut is an interesting place.

Probably everybody that comes here may say that about their context.

I think it's always interesting to learn about different contexts.

But Connecticut, I think, is pretty unique in that it's very small.

I think we're the third smallest state.

So you can really get from point A, wherever it is, to point B, wherever it is, within a couple hours anywhere around the state.

You can always have face time.

I- That's a big asset, I think, for someone in my role.

I actually can have face time in district with teachers, with administrators.

I actually get to know the field and have a personal or professional relationship with them.

So that's a real asset.

There are, in this tiny little place, over 200 school districts.

So that also is a unique aspect of Connecticut.

And within those over 200 school districts, there are approximately 60,000 EL/ML students.

The vast majority of those students reside in our large urban school districts.

But we've seen more of a diffusion of our EL/ML students across the, um, broader range of contexts around the state.

So we do see more LML students across our more suburban and rural communities.

So that means that communities that historically really didn't have our EL/ML students are now having the opportunity to work with these amazing students, but may not necessarily have as many teachers or administrators with particular pre-service or in-service training on how to do that.

So there's a little bit of a, a mismatch in terms of their training and the students that may be sitting in those seats.

And so that is a challenge of practice, both for the districts and for us at the State Department to ensure that we're supporting our districts.

To ensure that they can support, in turn, their students.

Our f- most prominent language is Spanish.

Absolutely by far that's the most prominent language, and our students that speak Spanish primarily come from Puerto Rico.