K-12 students – ��

Short Thousands of Bilingual Teachers, California Schools Turn to High School Students

Zaidee Stavely — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:30:00 +0000

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California’s audacious goal of having half of all K-12 students enrolled in bilingual education programs by 2030 has encountered one big stumbling block — there aren’t enough qualified bilingual teachers.

To help remedy that, a $10 million grant tucked in the state budget aims to help school districts recruit high school students as future bilingual teachers.

The funding in the that passed Thursday allows schools to partner with community colleges and universities to help students obtain a teaching credential and the bilingual authorization required to teach English learners.

Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-Chula Vista, said the idea for the legislation came in part from school districts that communicated about their struggles to find qualified bilingual teachers.

“I kept hearing from districts and educators that bilingual students want to become teachers but run into a fragmented system with no clear path through high school, community college, university and credentialing,” said Alvarez.

Researchers and coordinators of bilingual teacher preparation programs applaud the new grant program, but say it’s not nearly enough to meet the state’s needs.

“Grant funding is important, but to me it just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be enough, given our size and also the size of our dreams and our ambitions as a state,” said Lucrecia Santibañez, a UCLA professor and author of two recent reports on bilingual teacher preparation.

The demand for bilingual teachers

California set a eight years ago to enroll half of all K-12 students in programs that help them become proficient in two or more languages by 2030.

But to reach that goal in the next four years, California will need an estimated 6,000 more bilingual teachers.

Several recent reports paint a picture of California’s bilingual teacher preparation as an unfinished quilt filled with gaps, rips and uneven stitching. Not enough bilingual teacher preparation programs exist, the reports found, and those that do exist are too far from the districts with the highest demand for bilingual teachers.

In addition, bilingual students interested in becoming teachers are often stymied by the extra cost to finish both a teaching credential and a bilingual authorization — which requires several classes and 20 hours of student teaching, and can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 on top of a college degree.

California has more than doubled the number of bilingual authorizations issued to teachers annually, from 617 in 2014-15 to a record 1,370 in 2023-24, according to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Yet Santibañez and other UCLA researchers found that districts issue hundreds of emergency bilingual teacher permits each year for teachers who are not fully qualified to teach bilingual instruction.

The demand for bilingual teachers is not the same everywhere. While some districts have developed thriving dual language immersion programs and found ways to increase their numbers of bilingual teachers, many others lack the teachers and the funding to build these types of programs.

“We’ve worked with districts that have had to close programs they started, and they just couldn’t staff it, and the parents were very disappointed, but the district didn’t want to have long-term subs running their dual language program, which is fair,” said Anya Hurwitz, executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit organization that provides bilingual curriculum training for school districts. “There are other districts that have built more robust relationships with teacher prep programs, but those are the early adopters or the outliers, not the norm.”

Bilingual teaching deserts

The areas in California with the greatest need of bilingual teachers are also the areas where preparation programs are scarce or underfunded, UCLA’s Santibañez said. Imperial County on the Mexico border, as well as Kings and Tulare counties in the Central Valley all have large English learner populations but have no preparation programs nearby.

“We know from the research that teachers and students in college who decide to become teachers like to stay close to where they live,” said Santibañez. “So when the teacher preparation places aren’t really building capacity in a region that has tremendous growth of multilingual learners, it’s going to create that sort of access or needs gap.”

Fewer established bilingual teachers in an area also means there are fewer teachers who can serve as mentors for student teachers, she said.

“We don’t necessarily see somebody from San Diego or even from L.A. making the two-hour trip to Indio or Coachella or Calexico or wherever to do those mentoring sessions. So it is important to grow the capacity where the capacity is needed,” Santibañez said.

Starting in high school

The new legislation responds to some of the researchers’ recommendations. For example, school districts will be given priority for grants if they have a high percentage of students who are English learners and not enough teacher preparation programs.

Sparking interest in bilingual teaching among high schoolers, as the new grants would do, is crucial, said Adam Sawyer, director of the bilingual authorization program at California State University, Bakersfield. He said his university helps as many as 30 credentialed teachers get their bilingual authorization every year, and also has a bilingual teaching residency established with local elementary school districts that enlists about 10 to 15 student teachers per year.

Sawyer said CSU Bakersfield is working to establish an undergraduate pathway for prospective teachers and a dual-enrollment course for high schoolers, which will start next year.

“I have always thought this would be a wonderful way to start tapping into high school juniors and seniors that may not have thought about bilingual teaching, but may start seeing that as, ‘Hey, that might be something I want to do!’ ” Sawyer said.

‘A drop of water in the sea’

Still, the new funding, which will be distributed in grants of up to $600,000, is not a lot to address the need for bilingual teachers, educators say.

“It’s not a whole lot of money to do great things,” said Eduardo Muñoz-Muñoz, San José State University professor and co-author of a report by the California Association of Bilingual Teacher Education and Californians Together. “It’s a drop of water in the sea.”

Researchers have called for California to collect and publish data on the number of dual language immersion programs in the state, how many students they serve and the number of teachers with bilingual authorizations working in them.

More data would help the state pinpoint where to fund more bilingual teacher preparation programs, Muñoz-Muñoz said.

Santibañez and Muñoz-Muñoz also recommend the state offer more financial aid for students working on bilingual authorizations on top of their teaching credentials, a stipend for students to complete student teaching in a bilingual classroom, or bonuses for teachers who have bilingual authorizations, which not all districts provide.

“There’s just got to be an incentive,” Santibañez said. “You’re a college student, right? You’re getting your teaching credential, and you speak Spanish because you’re a heritage language speaker. So getting a bilingual authorization seems like something like a slam dunk, right? But you have to pay for it.”

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Lawmakers Demand Info on Students Detained by ICE, Including on Their Schooling

Jo Napolitano — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 16:30:00 +0000

New York Congressional Democrats have demanded that the departments of Education and Homeland Security provide information on the welfare of recently detained students — including whether they are receiving educational services.

Led by U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, they expressed “profound concern” to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Education Secretary Linda McMahon “about the pattern of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting K-12 public school students throughout the country.”

They cited the cases of five young New Yorkers — including a 6-year-old Ecuadorian girl who was in August while her brother, , remained in adult Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. Two other siblings, one a K-12 student, were left in New York without their mother.

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“ICE’s targeting of not only adults without criminal convictions, but also children and families, negates the administration’s stated policy of going after the ‘worst of the worst’ for deportation proceedings,” they note in signed by eight other New York Democratic U.S. representatives, including Ritchie Torres and Jerrold Nadler.

They demanded to know the total number of students — from kindergarten to college-age — arrested by the Department of Homeland Security since President Donald Trump took office in January. They want to learn how many remain in ICE custody, their average length of stay and what percentage were or are being held alongside their families.

They further asked how the U.S. government is meeting its legal obligation to educate these children and, more specifically, about the quality and language proficiency of the teaching staff.

“The Department of Education has the responsibility under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution to ensure that all students have equal access to education,” they wrote. “Please provide copies of curricula, sample lesson plans, and rubrics currently in use at ICE detention facilities, processing sites, and Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters.”

An Education Department spokeswoman said Monday that it will respond to the letter when the government reopens. In a statement to ��, DHS did not answer any questions about the school-age children detained by its agents, but blamed the media for “attempting to create a climate of fear and smear law enforcement.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman speaks with federal agents after observing a June 18 immigration court hearing at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Ocasio-Cortez and Espaillat did not respond to ��’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for Goldman, whose district encompasses Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, said he “remains extremely committed to holding ICE accountable for terrorizing our schools and communities.”

The U.S. representatives’ worry about the fate of immigrant children echoes concerns being voiced nationally. Advocates say their communities are living in are targeted near school grounds, particularly in and where ICE tactics have been aggressive.

Alarm over agents’ actions and their apparent lack of accountability was a central theme of the more than 2,700 attended by millions across the country this past weekend.

Ranking Democratic members of two congressional subcommittees said Monday against ICE agents, citing that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been held — including nearly 20 children.

Rebecca Brown, supervising attorney with Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project (Rebecca Brown)

“There’s no boundaries in this dragnet,” Rebecca Brown, a supervising attorney with Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told �� . “Now there’s no ‘off limits.’ Everything is fair game.”

Not only are children and their parents being swept up near school grounds, Brown said the current federal government shutdown is making it increasingly difficult for families — and attorneys — to locate anyone who’s been detained.

“With this administration and with this budget shutdown, it is really hard to get folks on the phone,” she said.

Immigrant advocacy organizations are urging parents to make guardianship plans, including those specific to their child’s schooling. One such group, in response to the massive uptick in enforcement efforts, said for the first time it’s helped some 100 families this year make binding educational plans for their kids in case their parents or guardians are arrested or deported.

“We have not used this in prior years,” said Julie Babayeva, supervising attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group’s LegalHealth Unit. “We are doing this much more now. This is becoming super urgent.”

More than were in government detention in late September, according to a clearinghouse that tracks federal data. More than 71% had no criminal convictions. More than unaccompanied minors were in government custody as of Oct. 20, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under HHS, oversees their care at some and programs in 24 states and is charged with detainees’ schooling. ORR did not respond to requests for comment.

Undocumented immigrants over 18 are sent to adult holding sites. Dylan Lopez Contreras, 20 and a student at a New York City high school dedicated to older newcomers, is among them. The Bronx resident was arrested in May in a high-profile case and remains in detention as his lawyers denying him asylum and deporting him back to Venezuela.

Contreras’s case was also cited in the letter to Noem and McMahon, with the representatives noting he is being held hundreds of miles away from his family in Pennsylvania at the “Moshannon Valley Processing Center, from which there have been reports of insufficient medical care and use of solitary confinement.”

Conditions at both and have been widely criticized. In addition to concerns about young people’s overall health and safety, at these sites: substandard curriculum and untrained or underqualified staff are among many complaints.

Just last week, immigrant from Everett, Massachusetts, was arrested after authorities fielded a “credible tip” in which the student was said to have made “a violent threat against another boy within our public school.”

Erika Richmond-Walton, litigation fellow at Lawyers for Civil Rights. (Erika Richmond-Walton)

His mother, who arrived at the local police station to pick him up, was instead told ICE had already taken him away. The family, from Brazil, has a pending asylum claim. The mother from two different immigration facilities, one in Massachusetts and the other in Virginia.

“He cried a lot because he had never been away from home or his family,” she said. “He was desperate, saying ICE had taken him.”

Erika Richmond-Walton, a litigation fellow at Boston-based Lawyers for Civil Rights, said the detention and deportation of young kids “is definitely not protecting or advancing their educational rights. Deporting children contradicts decades of settled law.”

And even if the children themselves are not targeted, the removal of their parents is devastating. One California mother is bereft after her husband was detained in late September after dropping off their 8-year-old daughter at school.

The woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of immigration enforcement, told �� she talks with her husband every day through video chat and that she expects him to be deported to their country of origin. She said government officials told her husband they are “waiting for the plane to fill up so they can send it to Colombia.”

Protestors march with signs and flags in a late afternoon No Kings protest against the Trump Administration in Detroit, Michigan, USA, on Oct. 18. (Getty Images)

, said the well-documented damage to school-age children of aggressive deportation extends far beyond increased absenteeism, anxiety and plummeting grades. In a just society, he said, young people learn political norms through what they see.

“When a child watches a federal agent drag a parent from a car line or hauls someone off in front of classmates, they absorb a lived lesson: Power may be exercised arbitrarily, and some lives can be violated in public without accountability,” he said.

Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of the Opportunity To Learn Program and a senior attorney at The Advancement Project, located in Washington, D.C., said immigrants at schools is dubious.

“I think this administration is tricky when it’s saying we are not sending ICE to schools but are sending ICE after students who are on their way to school — and targeting communities and children no matter where they are or what their age.”

Prior administrations took such circumstances into account, at least to an extent, said Brown of the Public Counsel’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. But early on in his second term, Trump rescinded a longstanding restriction against immigration agents carrying out enforcement actions in so-called sensitive locations, including schools.

“There was some consideration for age and vulnerability,” she said. “We’ve seen an uptick in enforcement around schools. … This is by design: You punish the kids in order to get the parents to comply.”