Improving ECEC Quality for DLLs: Lessons from Home Language Survey Expansions

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[00:00:49.01] - Katherine Habben

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Katherine Habben, and I'm an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute's National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. Welcome to today's microlearning session on Improving ECEC Quality for DLLs: Lessons from Home Language Survey Expansions. Today's session will focus on lessons from Illinois' expansion of home language survey use across ECEC settings and how they have overcome challenges related to removing barriers and improve— to improve data collection, developing common identification policies and procedures, and preparing the workforce for implementation. We will pause after each topic, so please type any questions into the Q&A box. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our two fantastic speakers for today, Tammy King, Program Manager for ESL and Bilingual Initiatives at Early Childhood Professional Learning, and Dr. Lindsay Meeker, Content Specialist with the Latino Policy Forum. So without further ado, Lindsay, Tammy, I pass it to you.

[00:01:52.27] - Tammy King

Excellent. Thanks, Kate. I will— there we go. So as you said, I'm Tammy King. I work for Early Childhood Professional Learning, which is a nonprofit agency in Illinois that provides professional development and support to our state-funded pre-Ks. And if you'd like to connect to me on LinkedIn, this is one of those opportunities where you can pull out your phone during a webinar and you can scan that QR code there and connect to me on LinkedIn. And Lindsay, I'll hand it over to you.

[00:02:20.18] - Lindsay Meeker

All right. I'm Dr. Lindsay Meeker, and I'm assistant professor of early childhood at Fresno State University. And I also have affiliations with Western Illinois University, where this work actually started before I transitioned into California and serving right now in this project as content specialist with Latino Policy Forum. So I'm very lucky to be in lots of spaces where we have rich opportunities to look at the way we are doing early childhood for DLLs. So I think that's, that's who I am. That's what I do. And my email is there as well as my Instagram. So please feel free to connect.

[00:03:03.09] - Tammy King

Awesome. And so we are so grateful to have this opportunity to share this information with you from the work that we have been doing here in Illinois. And this is just one piece where this work that we're going to be sharing with you this morning builds on other work that's been done before us. And then we'll even be able share with you some of the work that has continued after this particular project has ended. But when we were putting together the slides for today, I stumbled upon this quote and it made me chuckle, and Lindsay as well. So I thought it was something worth putting in here for you if you haven't seen this particular quote. So there's nothing like looking. If you want to find something, you certainly usually do find something if you look, but it's not always quite the something that you were after. And that is definitely— now that we have this project in our rearview mirror that we've worked, uh, so diligently on, we definitely discovered some things that we didn't know to look at the very beginning, and we've learned quite a bit, and it's our hope to share that with you this morning so that you can learn from our experiences here in Illinois.

[00:03:59.26] - Tammy King

So we wanted to start off first with sharing why we decided to focus this particular project, which is a Preschool Development Grant, which is a federally funded grant that we received in 2023, and the funding actually ended at the end of December of 2024, and we focused it on home language surveys in the preschool space. And so we're going to share with you why we chose to focus the work in that area and then what came from that.

[00:04:31.21] - Lindsay Meeker

As you take a look here, we're just going to think a little bit about the different words that we have to describe multilingual learners and English learners across, across the country, and also sometimes even within the state, depending on what kind of programs, supports, services, and funding they might need. So in early care and education, right, birth to 5, we're taking all children ages birth to 5, and sometimes we're even looking at that prenatal piece, and we're thinking about who might be a multilingual learner, who exhibits bilingual assets, what do their families exhibit as far as bilingual assets, And all children are often referred to then as multilingual learners or dual language learners that have other language assets besides English. And when some of the children might be exhibiting English proficiency for their developmental stage, we wanna continue to develop their access to their home language, continue to think about biliteracy when possible, and continue to support and nurture that. However, When we're thinking about funding and identification for the purposes of funding and the purposes of policy changes, then we're thinking about who is that protected group of children that require additional programming, and how do we figure that out in a birth to 5 setting.

So then you might hear the term English learner come up, and that's where we in Illinois have decided, okay, we have this large group of multilingual learners. Now who do we really need to think about as far as protected funding, services, and support? And so when you hear us say English learner or EL, that's why. It has nothing to do with our thoughts about home language and why we would continue that, because that should continue for everyone, right? And then we're thinking about English language development supports for those who need additional programming. So when we look here, we can see How would we think about using home language in different programs and at the different ages and stages? The first PDG project we focused on, as Tammy said, was focused on preschool age, and I was lucky enough to come in in the last part of that project as a consultant with Tammy, but they were doing the work long before I stepped in, and they were focused really on preschools that receive particular kinds of funding, okay? And but not just in schools, also in community-based care and education. So maybe they were receiving Preschool for All funding for which is our state preschool funding, or potentially Head Start funding, and sometimes more than one funding source, but preschool only.

And then when we started the project with Latino Policy Forum, we said, wait a minute, because we're not tied to particular grants at this time and we have the luxury of very open-minded funders, um, let's see about looking at birth to 5, because we know language doesn't start at 4. So when you look here, you'll notice that that birth to ages 2 to 3 programming, we're looking really to give that child's language identity a hug, right? We're trying to nurture the child in their home language, spark that bilingual brain, really sharing with families the importance of continuing their home language at home, reading at home in their, in their home language. And then thinking about as we move into that ages 2 to 3 to 5 programming, and you might wonder, why would I put ages 2 to 3? Why is there not that clear cut? That's because sometimes we might have transition rooms that we're thinking about. And that's what we're looking at to build on that bilingual brain for instruction, for biliteracy. We're really diving deep at that point to think, could our centers possibly offer dual language classrooms? Do I have the— what kind of context do I have?

And so we're really looking at that becoming an instructional component across all of those ages and stages. We want to make sure we're nurturing translanguaging. As an asset in all classrooms and communicating with all families all the way across in their language of comfort. You'll notice where we have early identification and then English learners. So as we think about that protected and identified, that identified group for protective services, support, and funding, ages 2 to 3, we have a process where we're going to be trying to do an early identification to ensure that we have what we need to do equitable special education considerations, making sure we think about language early, equitable access to home language. And then as they move into that age 3 to 5, we'll be thinking more about what specific assessments are we going to do. And you'll see later the kind of tools that can fit within that continuum. And I'm gonna hand it to Tammy to talk about some research.

[00:09:25.17] - Tammy King

Awesome. So we wanted to share with you, of course, there's, there's decades of research in this space, in the early learning space and around multilingualism and the benefits of bilingualism. But we wanted to share with you two of the most recent pieces that have come out in case you hadn't heard of them yet. So the first one, if you look on the left-hand side of your screen, it talks about shared reading and home language boosting early literacy skills. So there was a study recently published of multilingual preschoolers in Luxembourg, which is a trilingual country. The— actually, the top four languages, I looked it up, are Luxembourgish, French, German, as well as English. So the vast majority of the population in Luxembourg is at least trilingual.

And so they did this study, and what they found, unlike some other studies previously, is they looked specifically at the effects of reading— parents reading in the home language, whatever that home language is, which may be different depending on the family in Luxembourg. Um, what were those effects? And so what they found is, is that reading at home, shared reading experiences with young children in the first language, significantly increased children's reading skills and print knowledge. Now, that's this— that's from the left-hand side of the screen. And then on the right-hand side of the screen, you see the little piece there about shared reading has declined post-pandemic. So what we see in this piece— this comes from NIEER— that there has been a decline in shared reading in families since the beginning of the pandemic. And I know we're several years now from that, but it is not fully recovered. We don't see the levels back, and there are various factors that are still impacting that, including, as it's noted in this study, increases of screen time at home, and parent— continuing parent fatigue. However, there are still plenty benefits, plenty of benefits that remain substantial ones, including positive impact on language development, positive impact on social-emotional growth.

And just as a quick little reminder, children that were born in the very first few days of the pandemic, at least in the United States, would be turning 5 years old and entering kindergarten this fall. So this is, um, We've already been seeing children in our early care and education settings, but again, they're going to be going into kindergarten, and then anyone that was born after the very first few days of the pandemic and the shutdown, of course, they're going to still be in our early childhood classrooms at this point. So something to kind of give us a little bit of context, and I think at this point we're going to take a brief pause and check our Q&A box. So if you give me just a moment to do that and see if we have—

[00:11:58.10] - Lindsay Meeker

I'm putting the study links in the chat. Very excellent. And then also we do have, while it's not as new, it's very important, right? There was an English learner in Chicago Public School study in 2021 that talked about the influence of pre-K and early grade years. And it just gives us another example of why providing equitable access to early learning and ensuring that we know who our early learners are that need additional language supports as well as that extra hug to their language identity and home language support, why that's so important. The, the, the study's from 2021, but we know that it continues to be true and we want to continue to have that conversation. So I put that in the chat box as well. Any questions?

[00:12:45.25] - Katherine Habben

Thanks, Lindsay. Okay, there don't seem to be any questions yet, so please, if you have questions, remember to put them into the Q&A box because we'll take breaks in between each topic to answer some questions. So Lindsay, Tammy, maybe we can move on to the next one and we'll see when there's questions, we can address those.

[00:13:05.02] - Lindsay Meeker

Absolutely. Great.

[00:13:06.24] - Tammy King

Perfect. So the main body of what we're presenting to you today comes from the PDG B-5 English Learner Identification Project. That was the actual name of, of this portion of the PDG project here in Illinois. And this was designed as an equity initiative with the goal of identifying preschool English learners, which is the term used in Illinois School Code, in community-based organizations, which is the term used in Illinois for preschool programs that are operated, or early childhood programs operated outside of public school districts. So let me show you just a little bit. Actually, I have one more slide first. Oh, my apologies, I clicked too many times. Um, what we believe in the study, of course, is that equitable identification begins first with completing a home language survey with all children at all centers. This is not the common practice right now in our state, and so that's what we were working towards. Was to have every child care center use the Illinois State Board of Education Home Language Survey. I'll explain why on a later slide as to why we were embracing that particular form, but to do with all children at all centers, because quite frankly, you can't find what you don't look for, right?

So that is where we put our efforts on this. And here is why. If you take a look at this particular slide and you'll see the link down at the bottom, it may be a bit of an eye test, my apologies, but this comes from the Early Childhood Funding Commission report. Which was put out here in Illinois a number of years ago, 2022, I believe. And this is what we refer to as the patchwork quilt or the spaghetti slide, affectionately in our state, that shows all of the different funding sources for early childhood in the state of Illinois. And you'll see across the top, I'm only going to highlight just this top row here, the source of funding. So here in Illinois, only those children who are being served, preschool children, who are being served in an early childhood, what we call early childhood block grant. So they're coming from a state-funded preschool program, and that state-funded preschool program is being operated by a public school district. They're the only children that need to be screened and served for English services. All of the other pieces that you see on the screen, they do not have to screen, they do not have to serve.

So we were going out and providing, in many cases, brand new information to centers that didn't even know we had a home language survey. Or what the benefits of identifying children's other languages were and why we would want to know that. So again, just that little red box, and frankly, even only part of that little red box are the ones who are required to screen and serve right now in Illinois.

[00:15:42.24] - Lindsay Meeker

And I think it's important to note really quickly on that slide that we don't have to go back to it, but just noticing that you might see simultaneous narrative out there that Illinois is working to streamline their funding and support and also and really putting English learners, multilingual learners within the front side of that conversation through our development, which is we call IDEC, the Illinois Department of Early Childhood. And so I think it's just important to note that from the moment they started thinking about how do we go from the spaghetti slide to something much more cleaner, much more direct and much more user-friendly in the state, multilingual learners and children with disabilities have been a part of the whole planning process as far instead of an afterthought. And so I just wanted to identify that for this group when we started to think. So the project that I'm working on now and with Latino Policy Forum, my entire team is amazing, and we are working on what we call the Illinois ECE Multilingual Learner Research Practice Partnership. And we are also starting with the ISBE Home Language Survey. So even though we're serving lots of programs across the ages and stages, including looking into how it can work in family child care, we still said using that home language survey should be common across all settings.

And then the other thing is, for us, it's already translated into multiple languages, many, many languages, right? So Tammy noted that. And so that makes it very user-friendly. What we have noticed is that some people, most people are doing something that we've worked with, and we're working with 13 centers right now and one family child care. Most of them were doing something, but not a common something. So they might have been doing something that related directly to the curriculum they're using or something that someone developed within house. But when we're thinking about articulation, that home language survey being common is really important. And it's also really important to note that you want something that meets your state vision and mission for, for learning in your learning, right? And making sure that it doesn't ask people questions that might be difficult or even unethical. So you want to make sure that whatever you're using is common and common, ethical and friendly for the user. And so we're looking here and what are we doing though for a child that is younger than 3 years old? So we're, we started to think about that. What can that look like?

Well, we know one thing is that any one assessment at a table for a child lower than 3 years of age, that's going to be difficult. So what we developed was a family language interview tool. There are other states and programs that have looked at a family language interview tool. Um, there are some pieces that Head Start had originally kind of thought about in their family enrollment packet. And so this language tool, we looked at what's available out there. We dived a little deeper to say, how do we really understand the family's language goals for the child and how the child is currently using their home language and how the families are using that home language with their child? And then we looked at how do we do something like for the 3 years or older is something, some kind of assessment that's natural in their setting. Pre-IPT is the one very commonly used in our state. We are also in this project not in any way reinventing DRDP, but for centers who are already using DRDP as part of their assessment process and they have been trained by DRDP, we're trying to look at Is there a way to use DRDP in the ELD measures to think about how that can be a part of their considerations for being an EL or receiving targeted supports, funding, and services, knowing that when we have to screen children when they first come in with the pre-IPT, we might be getting— we might not be getting the best results of that child's language because it's not over time, While it's a— while I think it's a very quality test, children are young and testing is hard, right?

And so we were trying to think about how do we approach that observational kind of assessment as part of our considerations for identification. So if they're ages 3 and below, if they're below 3, they complete the Family Language Interview tool that we developed and we are testing right now in our research practice partnership. And then if they're 3 and older, then they would complete the assessment, either the DRDP and looking at the DRDP in a different way and using those English language development measures, or the PreIPT. In both ages and stages from birth to 5, something we added that we felt was really important is we developed an Infant/Toddler Home Language Observation Tool and a Preschool Home Language Observation Tool. And why that's important is that we need to consider all of the language assets and repertoires. And really, this is, this is a way to do it, right? When children first come in and we're looking at identification, we can't just understand where they are in English. We also need to understand how they're using their home language and how we can build upon that. In our study, what happens is centers are trying all of these components and then they're giving us feedback to say, What actually feels manageable in our center at any given time?

We are then going back and reworking our tools that we developed, rethinking how we did— gave directions for them to do the tools, you know, to use the tools in their setting, and then working through a continuous improvement model so that by the time we're done, we feel like we really understand what's manageable for centers. So that's kind of— this is what the picture is that you see on the slide. And the process. Okay.

Yep.

[00:21:59.13] - Tammy King

And so for both of the projects, the one that Lindsay is mentioning through Latino Policy Forum, as well as the one that we wrapped up at the end of December, we were very intentional in reaching out to and including folks from the entire state of Illinois. Here in Illinois, there's often a perception that English learners or multilingual families are primarily in the city of Chicago, which would would, you know, be up here and in the, what we call the collar counties, which is the area right around the city. But in fact, we know from our work and from our experience in the field that we have children everywhere in our state. And so this is some of the data that we found in the Preschool English Learner Identification Project through PDG. You'll see we walked into this with the perception that maybe there would be certain areas where we wouldn't find any, maybe, maybe we wouldn't find any multilingual learners, and we weren't sure how many we would find. But in fact, as you can see here across the top part of the state of Illinois. We had 16 facilities that we worked with. 100% of them had multilingual learners, and in fact, so they had so many multilingual learners that 75% of those sites actually would qualify for staff if they were funded through a different, um, in a different way in the state of Illinois.

Because they're CBOs, because of the way they're funded and the policies that apply to them, they don't have to staff for their English learners. They don't receive the funding to do so, but if they did 75% would qualify for staff. And then as we move down, you see Region B, which is kind of that other northern Illinois. I'm sorry, that first one was city and suburbs. Region B is northern, other areas in northern Illinois. 5 facilities there, 100% had multilingual learners, 60% met the criteria for staffing. C, which is the central part of Illinois, 5 centers there, 100% had multilingual learners, 20% qualified, met the criteria for staffing. And in the southern portion of Illinois, which included what we call Metro East, which is the part of Illinois just over the Mississippi River from St. Louis. 100% of those sites had children that were multilingual, and 75%, so 3 out of the 4, met the criteria for staffing. So we knew this, we knew this going in, but we wanted to make sure that we shared this data with you as well so that you could see how this worked out. And then Lindsay, I don't know if you wanted to add to this slide at all.

[00:24:15.27] - Lindsay Meeker

Yeah, so one thing to say, right, is that goes back to why it's important that every single family takes the home language survey. So one question that we get is sometimes, well, do we just give it to the families who we think speak another language? Absolutely not. We need to give them to every family because all of these regions had directors or teachers or somebody that said, I don't think we have multilingual learners. And it wasn't their fault. We don't have a space. We didn't have a way for them to know that. Right. But what they found out when they used the home language survey for every child in their center, every family filled it out, is that that is in fact what, what showed up. The— for our project, we are also working across the state, and we intentionally did so, and we intentionally thought about because we're working with less programs because we're doing— we're digging deeper, we had to really think carefully. So what we did was we went in and looked at each kind of region of the state, and we identified centers first that we could see from their Illinois home language data for elementary, as well as just some of our own experiences and talking to centers, like which programs might be most impacted or which programs might be surprisingly impacted, and work to intentionally include them in our project.

But again, they span across the regions as well, the same regions that are listed here. So I wanted us to highlight that all of them do have multilingual learners, but that was part of our project, was that they needed to have multilingual learners because we're diving deeper into some other factors.

[00:25:53.17] - Tammy King

Okay, awesome. So here's just a quick screenshot. You can see what the cover of the actual final report was for the PDG project, and this report focuses on 3 key areas. The report itself is only about 30 pages long, so not, not too onerous to read. One section is on data collection practices, the second is on English learner identification policies and procedures, and then the last is about workforce training needs. So we're going to do for the next portion of our time together is go through those 3 key areas so you can see some of our findings and some of the key questions that we were asking. And we will provide you with the link to this report so that you can take a closer look at it. So the first piece was about data collection practices. Uh, the essential equity question that we posed in the report was, how do we remove technical, time, and communication barriers in order to enable more comprehensive data collection protocols across our mixed delivery system that serves our youngest learners here in Illinois. And so we have several essential practices that we have been— since we finished the actual project itself, we've been on the road, sort of, so to speak, or on the circuit, going to conferences and presenting on this and emphasizing these 4 essential practices for here in the state of Illinois.

This is the first one: implementing the ISBE home language survey for all families at enrollment, regardless of your funding source, And because we knew that we needed to have a piece to help address both staff knowledge base in this area, as well as families, and to allay any fears that they may have around filling out a form like this if they've never done that before, we created a series of home language— a series of videos around the home language and around the benefits of bilingualism. I apologize if you can hear that background noise, it should go away in just a moment. Home language survey videos for the families to watch, but also they serve as essentially a professional development piece for the staff members. We also learned through the project that it was very important to distribute the home language survey on paper at registration, like an actual sheet of paper to families. We had centers coming back and telling us that they got more and better information, more and better data than they've ever gotten when they gave it on a piece of paper. As Lindsay said, often they had some sort of piece that they had in place before.

A number of them, it was like a single data field on their online registration system, even with the ability for Google Translate. People just skipped it. But when it was an actual piece of paper in their home language, one side in English, one side in their native language, they found that people filled it out and turned it in. And we'll show you the link where, uh, in just a moment, where you can find that the Illinois State Board of Ed has translated the form into the the top 50, 5-0 languages in our state. So it looks like this. This is the part of the website where you would click on the various PDF versions and all the different languages available. And then this is what the form itself looks like in English. And you'll notice that there is intentionally a wide margin left on the top so that you can photocopy this on your center's letterhead to make it look a little more official and pretty. So the questions—

[00:29:07.01] - Lindsay Meeker

yeah, absolutely, go for it. Quick question about the family, like, or the family Home language, or sorry, the home language survey. There was a question about what are the questions on there, and you're seeing it right now, and it's very, very simple intentionally. Is, is a language other than English spoken in your home? If so, what language? Does your child speak another language other than English? If so, what language? And that's it on that initial home language survey. And, you know, we can talk more about what questions are on the family language interview protocol for 3 years and younger, but for the home language survey. It's only those two questions, and I think that might answer part of the question too about how do we ease the fear of families in any kind of context. And part of that is because we're absolutely not asking anything about status. You'll notice that there's zero information on there about their citizenship status or any of those kinds of pieces. And so that is the Home Language Survey. Very simple, to the point. And we do really encourage our centers and our home providers and our school system, the ideal way to give this is in a conversation, right?

So just knowing that sometimes it might get sent home, but when we have it in a conversation, that allows that first opportunity for the family to develop trust with with the person giving this, and it also provides opportunity for us to be there in case they want to bring up like something more, and we can provide help or support or services. Okay.

[00:30:53.21] - Tammy King

Awesome. Thank you, Victoria, for dropping that link in there so you can actually take a closer look at those. And I just wanted to add, in a moment we'll circle back. We're gonna talk about one other thing first, but then we'll circle back to those videos as well. And as Lindsay was saying, This is meant to be done in a face-to-face type of environment during registration. That also is the time where you can click that link and they can actually watch the video while you're there present. But we'll talk more about that in a moment. I think Lindsay, did you want to share on this one?

[00:31:19.14] - Lindsay Meeker

Yeah, so when we looked at the PDG project that was funded for— with Tammy's project with ACPL and the PDG dollars, Then we said, okay, if we have an opportunity and there's a magic wand, what would we want to do as next steps? And honestly, I was blown away with excitement because we— there was a lot of collective effort in launching this follow-up project, or in some ways simultaneous project, to be able to look birth to 5 on what is that standard definitions and identification procedures. What, what can that be? Birth to 5, not preschool, what can be some common requirements for specialized teaching, training, and preparation, and what makes that feasible for early care and education. How do we start to ask the questions about targeted funding and giving investments where they're needed in early care and education so they can support equitably? And then how do we approach multilingual family rights and representation? And so this is the 4 buckets that the Illinois ECE Multilingual Learner Research Practice Partnership, what we are looking at. I don't have preliminary data yet because we are looking at it, and hopefully we'll have an opportunity to share that as we, you know, we'll have different opportunities to share that out as the project continues.

[00:32:52.08] - Tammy King

Awesome. Excellent. And so this is— these are the videos that we spoke about. Like I said, we wanted to share a little bit more with you. If you scan the QR code that's on your screen right now, it will take you to the playlist that you see on your screen. What we did is we recorded two videos, um, the content that is, are two different videos. One is about filling out the Illinois State Board Home Language Survey and the importance, why we gather that data and the importance of it, and it literally goes through each question one by one, shows on the screen in different languages, shows families filling it out, and then explains why we're gathering that data and the purpose for it, and that we will not be asking about citizenship or anything of that nature. And then the second video, which is a bit shorter, that first one on the Home Language Survey is roughly 6 minutes depending on the language And that is available in our top 3 languages in Illinois. So English, Spanish, and Arabic with actual narrators, native speakers of those languages narrating those videos. And then in addition to that, when you're actually in YouTube itself, there you have the ability in YouTube to change it to another language should you so choose, um, with the closed captioning feature there.

And then the second set of videos is about the benefits of bilingualism. And Bilingual Brains in Young Children. And that again is available in English, Spanish, and Arabic with the live— with the narrators on hearing them read those scripts along with the video. And then with YouTube, you can change over the closed captioning to any of the languages that YouTube provides.

[00:34:19.16] - Lindsay Meeker

And then as Tammy and I designed those, something we want to point out is when you get in and watch it, you'll notice we did intentionally include images of families with their children in the videos to set the stage that we're, you know, this is a partnership. We're on this journey to increase bilingualism together. And so we wanted to make sure families were a part of the video development. And so you'll see that when you have time to watch.

[00:34:47.11] - Tammy King

And we'll— let me just page through this right here. You can see just a little bit of a close-up of this is the English video about the home language survey. And I must say, too, we received very, very positive feedback from the State Board of Ed when we showed them these videos. They were, they were very pleased with them. This is our— these are our metrics so far as of May 30th for the videos. We released them on December 13th on YouTube, and as of May 30th, we've had over 3,000 views and over 57 clock hours of people watching the videos. And you'll see here with the different time brackets that the gray has shot up. And that's because, at least here in Illinois, we do a lot of preschool registration in the spring. So, like, as the one school year ends before the next, so you could see, as we expected, a lot of folks watching the videos in April and May. And they are available for anybody on YouTube. You can watch them. All right, so I think that moves us into nicely the second section of the report, which is about English learner identification policies and procedures.

[00:35:54.15] - Tammy King

So in this portion of the report, the essential equity question that we were grappling with is how do we need to get— who, I'm sorry, who do we need to get at the table and what steps do we need to take to develop common identification processes in the birth to 5 early childhood education and care system in Illinois in order to ensure that we have equitable programs? Programming, funding, equitable assessment, special education evaluations, and family partnerships. I believe we touched on this briefly, but just to say it here since I just read that bullet about special education, one of the things that we find is when we don't ask about home language and we don't provide English as a Second Language supports for our children or bilingual supports, we tend to find an overrepresentation of children from multilingual families families in special ed programming, not because they necessarily have special education needs, but because frankly we didn't identify their, their language needs.

[00:36:49.12] - Lindsay Meeker

And I think one reason why we were starting at that immediate entry into early care and education, right, is because when children are receiving early intervention services, that's when that process of the IFSP begins for some children and some families. So we wanted to make sure that that piece was in place right away. Okay, and this is me, so I'll start this conversation. So, so yes, this is two different projects that we're talking about. And yes, Tammy and I did get an opportunity to work a little bit together on the first project after she'd already done a lot of work. But now we were sitting at that, you know, we're sitting in that conversation of it takes a village really to be able to look at your entire scope of early care and education. And think about how do you do this work in a way that everyone can access it, that everything's going to be open source, including trainings, including protocols, including tools, right? All of the things. How do you do that so that everybody can access them regardless of their funding streams? And so when we were thinking about how to do this, at Latino Policy Forum, we first, we did put together an advisory board.

So in addition to like the representation you see here on the slides, we have an advisory board that's working in our project that has people from school districts and community care and education and our Illinois government and advocacy groups. But then when we actually got down to even doing the work, you still need some additional components. You need somebody that's ready to do the lift on staff development and and learning, right? Continuous improvement and continuous investment in staff. And that's where my content specialist piece comes in for Latino Policy Forum. That's where ECPL in our state, it can be extremely helpful because that's the kind of work that is done there is training. We needed somebody who would be willing to have that communication back and forth between, okay, what's the state working on as a whole? For example, right now we have that Illinois Department of Early Childhood doing a work to get started. How can we make sure that what we're doing is actually helpful to the people trying to build larger systems? And so we are grateful to members of the IDEC team for being part of our advisory board and being a sounding board when necessary.

Same as with Illinois State Board of Ed, they are a part of our advisory board and they have been able to serve as a sounding board knowing that how do we navigate that. Latino Policy Forum is is, as all of you probably know, a powerhouse for equity, justice, and research for multilingual learners and their families, and really has been able to think about how do we take the learnings from our early care and education system and make them become something— like, what are we going to do with that to make it become scaled or to make sure it becomes common practice and not one component? We wouldn't have had as much data to launch from without Tammy's project. So we were able to take the learnings from ECPL's project focused on preschool and think about, okay, what might work next and what maybe didn't work that we want to avoid and take those learnings and expand then into training and some of those other pieces of investment into the system. And absolutely, without philanthropic sources of commitment and investment in the ECE Multilingual Learner Research Project, we would not be able to do it. So that's important to remember, is that there was the PDG project that was funded through PDG dollars, right?

But then we wanted to do that next step. And without philanthropic sources and without our team hustling to make sure that philanthropic sources understood exactly why this was so important, none of this could happen and, and it certainly wouldn't be able to be open source materials that are coming out. And that's the same with the videos that are coming out right now. Those are open source for everyone and it was grant funded because the funding available to early care and education sites and centers, we can't be putting things in the system that are going to cost them additional money to access. They're not funded to be able to do that, so we can't say, well, we've developed this great training and Now you're going to pay $5,000 a year and someone's going to help you learn it, right? And coach it. And we can't do that. So we're doing the learnings now. We're trying the training in lots of different ways. We are actually trying out some coaching and then we're going to figure out what's scalable so it can be open source. And then that brings in another partner. How do you make those open source materials available?

So we're working with Gateways Illinois and eventually we'll probably also be having some conversations with ECPL. So it's just really thinking about how does that village come together to have all the assets that we need. So when you're starting, considering your team's assets, gaps, and affiliations is going to be important. Thinking about what kinds of funding sources can be combined to support the work, because you probably won't get it from just one funder. It's probably going to be multiple funders and probably multiple stages of the project. Even now, we're like, oh man, next we want to see what we can do with home visiting and early intervention, but we're not there yet, and that wasn't funded in this project. What is currently working and how do you build from that? So, I met a lot with Tammy to say, okay, what went well for you? What didn't? What's going well in school districts where they all already have a process and maybe what's not? We met with specialists in the field to look at our tools and say, what do you think about this tool? What would you do differently before we had people try it?

And so, you also need to have partnerships with experts in the field beyond yourself. Right, that you can lean on for feedback, real critical feedback, not like, nice job, that's amazing feedback, but like, oh, that's really great, and let's look at this. You need to have trusted partners. So we just wanted to bring attention to that, that it is cross-agency work that we're doing, and that I don't know that we could be doing it any other way. I think it needed to be that way. And Tammy's gonna walk us through some essential practices.

[00:43:22.10] - Tammy King

All right, so when we— our first essential practice was about giving out the home language survey to each and every child regardless of where you think they might be from or what you think their language might be. Everyone gets the same home language survey so that you can gather that data. The next essential practice after actually giving out that home language survey, preferably on paper, is to make sure that everybody on staff receives the data. This is one of the things that we learned that we didn't expect necessarily to find, but we did, is that sometimes that home language data just went in a file or went on a spreadsheet and was never actually shared with the staff who needed to know it in order to be able to work with the children in a more meaningful way. Because unlike the photo that you see here on the screen, it's not like children's language backgrounds or nationalities are painted on their cheeks, right? Um, though that is pretty adorable. So, and then essential practice 3 of 4. So, and I should say too, when we talk about staff, we're talking about all the staff.

If you've got children who are being bused, the bus driver should know who speaks languages other than English in the home, right? The nurse, the school nurse should know. Everyone should be aware of this data around the children's home languages. And then the next natural step from this— this is another place where we learned some really useful pieces of information along the way. This has got to get into whatever your state database is, or your data warehouse. So here in the state of Illinois, we have something called the Student Information System, or SIS for short. Um, and so we wanted to ensure that the language data is actually entered into the SIS system. And if they— we also found along the way that a number of our programs weren't able actually to access and had never accessed before the demographic section of that data warehouse. Frankly, they didn't know what they didn't know. They didn't know it was there, so they never knew to ask. So part of the work we were doing was connecting them to the right people at the State Board of Ed to get them the access they needed in order to put in the student demographic data.

And in doing so, here's yet another interesting thing that we learned along the way. What you see here is a screenshot of part of the SIS student information system data entry pages. And what I'll just quickly call your attention to— don't get bogged down too much in all the details— but you'll see on one of the tabs here under program indicators, it turned out there was two different data entry fields, one called native language, one called home language, and they were being filled out in different ways and not consistent with the way that maybe they needed to be filled out prior to us starting this project. And so this became a stumbling block. We needed to provide training, provide resources and feedback, and ultimately feedback as well to the State Board of Ed around how much consternation these two different data fields created. Out in the programs. So that was something we didn't expect to find, but we did, and a super useful piece to have found.

[00:46:27.18] - Lindsay Meeker

We also found that some of the reporting systems that are used by early care and education hadn't really thought of having a field for whether or not a child is a multilingual learner and what languages they speak. So when we're working in some of our systems that we use, you know, that that we obtain through a vendor. We need some continued advocacy really nationwide from centers to say, and we need a place to put this data, because if they're pulling that data from the service that they might be using for their own internal student information system, and that's not a part of what they collect, we already have a gap because that But if that's part of the system, then it prompts people to think about it, right? But when it's not part of the system, then they— and they have to store that data somewhere else. The chances of articulating correctly or at all might be lessened.

[00:47:33.26] - Tammy King

Okay, absolutely. And Lindsay, I think you've got the next slide. And I know there have been a few questions that have popped up and we've kind of answered them as we've gone through. So far. So I just wanted to call attention to that.

[00:47:43.20] - Lindsay Meeker

So thank you for putting your questions in there, and we are watching them, and then we'll answer— we'll be able to answer some at the end as well. So then we begin to think about, okay, once children are identified, that's wonderful, and we need to make sure that we're equitably supporting our ECE workforce. They need to be invested in We have talked to our— as part of our research practice partnership, we have been talking with and interviewing and having focus groups with our early care and education staff in our sites, and they won't be able to serve without that targeted funding that we already provide in schools. And I know right now feels hard to talk about targeted funding for specific purposes, but But it is, is still important and it will continue to be important. So when we think about our early care and education workforce, that's why we started to think about those common open source trainings that people can access in a variety of ways. So for example, you know, we're putting together things that can be accessible asynchronous and also thinking about how can we create a train the trainer model?

How can we create a community of practice? Because we need to invest in our centers to be able to build their capacity within, right? And we need to do that in a way that doesn't cost them extra dollars, but they also need additional funding to be able to support the children they're serving. And that's where that policy piece, that's where that advocacy needs to come in strong and hard to say, we're already doing a lot of work. Now we have the numbers, now we have systems, and we need to support our workforce, which also includes barrier removal for upskilling through to things like your ESL bilingual endorsements or credentials. So just thinking about how do we think about training investment for multilingual staff so that they're being compensated appropriately for their multilingualism, for their training, for the pieces that they might have that relate to their multilingual learners and their families, as well as how are we ensuring they have access to a streamlined way to get the higher education pieces that they might need. You might have heard me say, yes, equitably funding workforce that is bilingual or multilingual. We have workgroups working on that in Illinois, so I'm not going to dive deep into it, but we pay interpreters in all kinds of facets of our world, and they make really good money, and we have some of our most vulnerable populations serving some of our most vulnerable families and children, and they are not compensated equitably for using their home language as an asset in their center or their workplaces.

And that is not because the centers don't want to. It's because until we make an investment investment into that population of language assets that we have, right? The people that have language assets, until we make a committed investment, centers are very limited in how they can compensate them. So I just wanted to make sure we know we're working on that, but it continues to be a workforce need. And as part of Tammy's project, we talked about what are— you'll see it in a minute. What are some low-cost, no-cost, all the way to high-cost ways that we can invest in our early care and education population as far as staff members go? And then in our project, we're also working on what does development look like. Okay, Tammy.

[00:51:32.25] - Tammy King

Awesome. So here we have our last of the essential practices that we have been recommending. Again, this is not an exhaustive list, but these are the top 4 that we have been pushing since we finished the project. So Essential Practice 4: encourage our staff to use training resources from our office, Early Childhood Professional Learning, because we are— what we are is a— we do not work for the state, but we receive state funding. We compete for a contract to provide free professional development to all of our state-funded preschool educators across the state of Illinois. So therefore, all of the training that we offer is free and pretty much online. So if you were to scan this QR code here or follow the link that you've got on the screen, you'll see all of the different resources that we have listed. Listed on our Preschool English Learners part of our website, and even if you're outside Illinois, you can still certainly access those trainings. Everything that we do, all of our webinars are archived, recorded, archived, and put up on YouTube so you can watch them at your leisure, and you'll also be able to access some other trainings and opportunities there as well.

In fact, we pull together from a number of different organizations in our state, and you can see their logos here, So I work here for Early Childhood Professional Learning, but Latino Policy Forum trainings from the WIDA Consortium, Illinois Resource Center, which is another department of our same organization. IRC works in the K-12 sector primarily. The Illinois Principals Association, Illinois STARNET, the State Board of Ed, and then the new Illinois Department of Early Childhood. And you'll see when you follow that link and go to our webpage, you'll see that there's links there to live webinars. Some of those are still coming, the registration, because we're in that space in between school years. So as we gear up for the fall, you'll see more and more webinars and registration links popping up. But there's on-demand trainings that target administrators, the multilingual videos, downloadable resources, and even credentialing and scholarship information is housed there as well. On that page.

[00:53:27.11] - Lindsay Meeker

And with STARNET, you might be thinking, what is that? It is an organization also funded by Illinois State Board of Ed and the Early Childhood Discretionary big grant, and we provide professional development on supporting children with disabilities and their families as well as technical assistance. But Tammy and I often are co-presenting to talk about how do we serve the children that are dual identified and how do we ensure that families that are bilingual have appropriate access and supports to understand their child's education. So those are the ways in which we bridge that partnership together. Latino Policy Forum. We're also working with Gateways Illinois, so we will be adding them to this slide, but we're working with Gateways Illinois and they are being so helpful in thinking about, in addition to what's offered here and through ECPL, how do we make sure that if people go to Gateways Illinois, which is where they handle their early care and education credentialing, how can we have all of the trainings that we're developing in, in this this current project of the Illinois ECE Multilingual Learner Research Practice Partnership, how do we have those available? And we're working on converting them into a way that it can be uploaded there so they can— staff can access them at any time for absolutely zero cost to the center as well.

Okay. Oops, I went too far. There we go.

[00:55:06.26] - Tammy King

Awesome. So we're going to share this with you, and then we'll address those last couple of questions that I believe are in the, in the Q&A box. So this is the last piece, the last, one of the last pages of the actual English learner identification report, which the link to that, I believe, thanks to Victoria, is in the chat. What we did is we took the various recommendations, the recommended action steps from each of the 3 different areas. So data collection, identification and workforce action steps. And then we categorized them by the approximate cost for actually implementing those changes. And so you'll see that they're also color-coded as well. So like data collection has a little yellow box at the beginning. So then on the left-hand side of your screen, we don't expect you to actually be able to read these. We just wanted to show you that we have found this to be very, very useful in our conversations across the mixed delivery system here in Illinois to be able to say, here Here are our action steps, and here is approximately what they might cost. And as you can see on the left-hand side of your screen, there's a whole group of action steps that can be taken for little or no cost.

[[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

[00:56:06.17] - Speaker 2

So maybe that's the place to start with some of these. Now we are in the process of transitioning to new governance, to a new Illinois Department of Early Childhood in— I believe it's something like 60 weeks or something around there, according to a newsletter I recently received— is coming up quick. So some of these may not be addressed until we have that transition completed. But the point is, this is— it was a useful way for us to organize this and share this out here in our state. So we just wanted to share that with you as a possibility, something to consider if you haven't organized, um, your recommendations in that particular manner. And then I do have a slide that gives you the QR code to take you to the report, but it's also in the chat box as well. And then I know, like I said, we do have a couple of last questions, um, Okay, and I pulled those questions up, so just, just a second.

[00:56:57.20] - Speaker 3

Um, so one of them was about the fear that families might have. I'm going to put a tool in the chat box in just a second while I let Tammy answer another question about that Latino Policy Forum has created that can help us navigate and provide resources to families But I think, I think that fear we needed to understand in the current climate was not just with families, but we have to remember that our early care and education sites are also feeling like they want to make sure they're following all the rules and supporting their multilingual learners at the same time. And so one way that we're helping with that is anything that comes out from either of our projects is open source. Course, meaning that no center would need to spend dollars from any sort of grant, federal, state, or otherwise, to be able to access the PD, to be able to access the tools, any of those components, so that right away we're, we're already over the hurdle of like being able to spend funding on particular things. Okay, so that's one piece. Um, we also have just been very honest with centers and said we know this might feel hard right now, and that's also why It's more important than maybe it's ever been.

[00:58:20.02] - Speaker 3

So please be brave with us, and we will work to make sure we're doing this in a way that feels manageable and safe and secure for you. For families, um, the home language survey might continue to feel difficult, but one thing that we talked about earlier, right, is limiting the number of questions that you ask, making sure that you fill it out with the families while they're there, Ensuring families that that data is for internal school use only, right? It's not something that you share out with other governmental organizations. That's why we actually have privacy laws for children and families. I think just being very clear about that. Tammy, anything you would add to that as far as just thinking about families in that way? The other thing I would say is if you have one consistent person that can walk through the entire enrollment enrollment process with a family, including the home language piece, then they can start to develop a relationship connection.

[00:59:23.20] - Speaker 2

No, I think you've covered all the bases. I can't think of anything else to add.

[00:59:26.06] - Speaker 3

So the other one is, is there— if, if there is, um, required ML-focused ECE coursework for ECE certification in Illinois, and how— and, and if not, how is that being addressed? So in Illinois, we can— there's a couple different ways to go about it. Um, you can get a ESL bilingual approval letter. So if your program already provides the early childhood special education approval letter, you can add— essentially add 3 classes and have the approval that you need. At the associate's level, we have developed an ESL bilingual credential that, um, that early care and education professionals can add. We also have the full endorsement that in most places is approximately 4 to 6 classes, like, total. But if they've already completed the 3 for the approval letter, it's very likely in most schools that they would just be able to add 2 or 3 additional. And some universities have been able to take that approval letter, think about the standards that are in those classes, which is a foundations curriculum and an assessment, and integrate them into the program so there's no additional courses So, for example, I did that work with my team at Western Illinois University.

[01:00:41.03] - Speaker 3

We integrated it. So now if people come through our ECE program, it's fully integrated and they will leave with their ECE, their special education approval letter, and their ESL bilingual approval letter. So it's also meaning we got to shop around, right? But ECPL— Tammy can talk a little bit about this— but they even offer the, the coursework for the ESL bilingual— not ECPL, I'm sorry, the center, IRC. They work together. They offer easily accessible endorsement options.

[01:01:12.13] - Speaker 2

So, for Illinois educators, yep, absolutely. And then we just had one— there's two last questions, and I'm realizing that we are pretty much at time. So there was a question that was asked about— I just accidentally clicked away from it— asking about bringing to the table and the dynamics and relationship. So that we go more in depth than that in the report. So I think that that's probably best left with that. And then there was one last quick question that just came in that's a bit of a clarification, so I can think I can address that quickly and then we can hand it back to you, Kate, so we can be respectful of everyone's time. Um, but I asked about the English learner identification assessment. So if you are in a state-funded preschool program in the state of Illinois that's operated by a public school district, yes, you must identify and serve children, and there's a lot of requirements around that, and you can find an FAQ document on the ECPL preschool page that delineates all of the requirements in that case. If you're outside, so if you're in a preschool or a child care program that is not state-funded or outside of a public school district, then no, they don't, they're not required to give an English learner identification assessment at this time.

[01:02:21.08] - Speaker 2

They can, but they are not required to do that. So what we did in this particular project is we focused exclusively on the implementation of the home language survey, because quite frankly, that was a lift in and of itself to get that out to all of the programs or to all of the families in all of the programs.

[01:02:38.11] - Speaker 3

And I would say stages matter. Like taking on too much of it at once can feel very overwhelming and might not feel as successful as you'd like it to be. You know, so the home language, like we are even in our, in our 2-year project, we're doing things in stages for centers. So when we're asking them to do things, we try to keep it focused on on one stage at a time or one task at a time so that we're not creating an overload of work. And then I think we're done.

[01:03:06.17] - Speaker 1

Great. Thank you both so much. I believe we got to every question. So thank you both so much for all of the great information that you've shared and for answering everyone's questions. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to myself or to Lindsay or Tammy. They provided their information at the beginning. Of the session, and reporters can contact Michelle Mittelstadt at the email address listed here. Today's webinar microlearning session, an audio and a video recording will be available on our events website at MPI's website. So thank you everyone for joining, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.