California State University, Fresno and the Fresno County Office of Education will join forces to produce 100 credentialed bilingual teachers for special education over the next five years, thanks to a $1,000,210 grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Dr. Paul Shaker, dean of the university’s School of Education and Human Development, today announced the program, Bilingual Career Ladder in Special Education — the second such program the university has successfully proposed in the past year.

Last summer, a five-year $952,500 Career Ladder grant was awarded to Fresno State for its Teaching Fellows program, the first of its kind in the state, that places high school graduates in classrooms as paid paraprofessionals while covering the cost of their education. (Earlier this week, the 31 Teaching Fellows met to begin preparing for that program which begins in the fall semester).

Under the new special education grant, the university expects to enroll its first students in the fall

1999 semester. The Career Ladder students will also receive full scholarships for their tuition and books.

The back-to-back awards are rare, Shaker said, and represent a double-edged approach to meeting special education needs.

“Bilingual teachers are scarce, and special education teachers are equally scarce,” Shaker said. “This is a promising recruitment initiative that will produce bilingual special education teachers for school districts in Fresno County.”

He said the county’s population includes more than 47,000 students who are limited in English language proficiency.

Participants will be from language backgrounds that are needed in central California schools -¬primarily Spanish, Hmong, and Lao drawn from urban (inner city) and rural school populations.

They will be selected from the pool of high school graduates who have completed the Fresno ROP Careers in Education, Teachers of Tomorrow, or McLane High School Teaching Academy; community college students enrolled in Fresno City College’s Education Career track; and special education paraprofessionals.

Like the Teaching Fellows, these students will be employed in special education classrooms where bilingual paraprofessionals are in demand.

They will move through the four-year educational process and a fifth year paid teaching internship, earning a baccalaureate and/or master’s degree, while meeting bilingual and special education certification requirements (preliminary Level 1 Education Specialist Credential in Mild/Moderate Disabilities, state certification in Bilingual, Cross-cultural, Language, and Academic Development Emphasis — BCLAD) and employment as fully credentialed teachers.

In addition to financial incentives, participants will receive support services through the university’s Paraprofessional Teacher Training Center, such as classes and tutoring for the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) and the Reading Instruction Competence Test (RICA).

The program is among 101 grants awarded this month by the Department of Education and totaling $21 million as part of a federal push to improve teacher quality in schools serving limited English proficient (LEP) students. Career Ladder grants make up 25 of these funded programs nationally.

“Teachers tell us they want and need better skills to meet the demands of a diverse student body,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley who announced the awards nationwide recently. “These grants respond to those concerns and will help ensure more teachers are trained to work effectively with students who enter school with limited skills in English.”

The awards, made by the Education Department’s Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages Affairs, will support collaborative efforts by schools, universities and state education agencies to develop and improve training programs to better meet the needs of a large and growing number of students not yet fluent in English.

According to the Council of Chief State School Officers, the number of LEP students increased between 1990 and 1997 from 2.1 million to some 3.5 million.

“As the number of LEP students has grown, so have the needs of school districts and staff who serve them,” Riley said. “The goal of these grants is to increase the number of qualified bilingual teachers and other educational personnel prepared to assist LEP students to meet high academic standards.”

For more information, contact Anne Murphy, director of Fresno State’s Career Ladder Program at (559) 278-0256 or Steve Price at 278-0230.