College Wins Grant to Help Boost Bilingual Teacher Ranks

Mission College has been awarded a $300,000 federal grant to establish a unique college program to help immigrant teachers learn English and obtain a state teaching credential, college officials said Wednesday.

The three-year U.S. Department of Education grant will be used to pay for special English classes, career workshops and analyzing the transcripts of foreign-educated students, said Victoria Munoz Richart, dean of academic affairs at Mission College.

The purpose of the Mission College program, called the Bilingual Expressway Program, is to increase the number of bilingual teachers, Richart said.

Officials of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which will participate in the new program, estimate that it will take 10 years to hire the number of Spanish-speaking teachers needed in the 610,000-student district. The district has about 192,000 Spanish-speaking students who are learning English and an additional 21,000 who speak one of more than 80 other languages.

So far, about 800 students have signed up for the Mission College program, which is scheduled to begin Monday, Richart said. “We’re getting people from all over the city,” she said.

Some students will need to complete classes to satisfy requirements for a bachelor’s degree, while others need only to become proficient in English. Other program assistance will include preparing for job interviews and the state teacher’s exam.

The two-year college, which for years has been operating out of storefronts in the city of San Fernando, received one of only 58 grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, college officials said. About 1,800 colleges and universities applied for the grants, which are reserved for innovative education programs.

“The grant is one of the highest rated we had,” said John Donahue, senior program officer for the Department of Education. “We hope the grant will help alleviate the shortage of bilingual teachers, and that it will be a model for other colleges in the United States.”

Richart said campus officials conceived the program idea after discovering that many immigrant students who had enrolled at Mission College to learn English had been professionals in other countries.

“We found we had a large number of people with degrees who were washing dishes and cleaning windows,” Richart said.

Students signing up for the program can also take classes at Cal State Northridge, which has agreed to participate in the new program, Mission College officials said.