Help higher-need students
Teaching non-English speaking students requires more from Richmond
For the second time in two years, a school board member in Hampton Roads is under fire for claiming that devoting resources to students who are not native English speakers harms overall education quality. Colleagues and critics have justifiably slammed Williamsburg-James City County School Board Michael Hosang for his baseless claims that undocumented immigrants are diverting resources from other students.
In fact, Virginia has for years underfunded education, including for higher-need students, including those for whom English is a second language. Legislation tweaking the commonwealth’s education funding formula, which should help alleviate some of those issues, passed the General Assembly this year and deserves Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s signature.
At a WJCC School Board meeting this month, Hosang earned a rebuke from other board members when he said that an influx of non-English speakers created “upheaval” in the district’s public schools. He said his daughter’s education was suffering because teachers were preoccupied with trying to teach that subset of students.
Virginia Beach School Board member Victoria Manning leveled similar complaints — that were similarly misguided — in 2022, writing on Facebook, “Our ESL budget has increased over $1 million in two years. Continuing to educate
South Americans is not sustainable.”
In fact, the state Department of Education reports that commonwealth public schools “serve more than 117,000 English-language learners who speak more than 240 languages, and come from a variety of learning and cultural backgrounds.”
Claiming, without evidence, that students who aren’t fluent in English may be undocumented immigrants is ugly and harmful. Hosang even suggested that parents with students in area schools should have been notified about ESL kids, which holds the distinction of being both un-American and unconstitutional.
Education for higher-need students, including those not fluent in English, is part of a larger funding crisis in public schools, as spelled out in a 2023 report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission that examined the state funding formula for public education, known as the Standards of Quality.
JLARC found that “Virginia school divisions receive less K–12 funding per student than the 50-state average, the regional average, and three of Virginia’s five bordering states.” What’s more, “The SOQ formula does not adequately account for higher needs students. State funding for at-risk students, special education students and English learner students is less than the level of funding determined necessary to educate them in cost studies performed in other states.”
In 2022, Virginia Public Media cited a study from Education Trust, a national education policy group, in its reporting that Virginia’s funding for districts with the highest number of English language learners “receive 48% less state revenue per student than those districts serving the fewest ELL students.”
JLARC concluded that an effective funding formula must account for the higher cost of educating higher-need students because, “Divisions have little or no control over how many higher needs students (at-risk due to poverty, special education, or English learners) live in their division.”
That’s the very essence of public education: teaching all students with equal vigor, attention and care regardless of status or background. That depends, in part, on the state providing the funding needed to meet that challenge.
So it was good to see the General Assembly tackle the SOQ formula this year, passing a bill that allows school divisions access to additional money to assist ESL students based on the number of those students in a given district. The state budget passed by the legislature also includes an additional $72.1 million in funding for English language learning, according to the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis.
Hosang was wrong to allege that the influx of non-English speaking students was due to illegal immigration, to imply that these students shouldn’t be in Virginia and to blame them for somehow degrading the quality of education in that community. While Virginia should be devoting more resources to ESL instruction — as the legislature did this term — Hampton Roads is right to expect that members of area school boards are better educated on the issues.