Beverly Kerr: These kids are bringing with them. They don’t know the culture, they don’t know the language. They have trauma like you would never, ever believe or understand, or thank God you’ve never had to experience it, and you need to give them some time and some love and some patience so that they can learn, but they’ve got so many obstacles in front of them.

That just completely changed the way I saw kids from that point forward. 

Mandi Morris: Welcome to the ML Chat podcast. Today we have Beverly Kerr, a veteran teacher having a conversation with us about the challenges that she’s facing in her school district that I think will feel very similar to other listeners today. She talks about trying to pull apart the different needs for students like reading, intervention and ELD block dual identified students, and the really strategic and analytical way that.

School district has approached those needs. You’ll find a common thread here that’s all about open communication and pulling data together [00:01:00] to have really informed conversations and PLCs you are going to very much so enjoy this conversation today. Let’s go. 

Holding a Master’s degree in curriculum and instruction in ESL from Arizona State University, and a master’s in K 12 Leadership from Northern Arizona University. Beverly Kerr is in her 26th year in education. She spent 18 years in the classroom before transitioning to coordinator of English language acquisition services at Deer Valley Unified.

Beverly’s Passion for education has built long-term relationships with students in the community. Beverly, welcome to the ML Chat podcast. We are very excited about this conversation today. 

Beverly Kerr: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to just chitchat 

Mandi Morris: about English learners. So tell us a little bit about your current role.

What is your school district like the students you’re serving? What does a day in the life look like for you right now? 

Beverly Kerr: I just said, I’m in Deer Valley Unified School District, which is in North Central and West [00:02:00] Phoenix in Arizona. We have 41 campuses, one online campus. We are a K 12 unified school district, and we’re about 350 square miles of district, fairly large.

We have approximately 1500 English learners in our district. Most of them up until recently, about the last three years, most of them have been in our Title one schools, but we’ve had the addition in the last three years of the Taiwan semiconductor plant coming into our district boundaries. And so as they came into our district, they brought with them originally about 280 students that came in within a.

Three month period, every two weeks we were getting another group of students. And those families have just by location of where the plant is, have settled into our. non-Title schools that typically do not have a lot of [00:03:00] English learners. So for them it’s been quite the learning curve of we went from four English learners in a K eight school to a hundred English learners in a K eight school in a matter of weeks.

So that’s been an interesting dynamic. And last I heard, we’re supposed to be getting a another big group next school year. So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens, what that brings. We have. 35 ish, I can’t remember off the top of my head. English learner teachers in our district. So we’ve been very fortunate that the district has put priority on English learners and making sure that they have teachers that are specifically for that content area and that learning where I’ve run into a lot of districts where it’s just supposed to be the general education classroom teacher that’s supposed to meet the needs of those students along with.

All of the other students in the classroom. We also have instructional assistants on every campus. There’s about 35 of them as well, and we have six [00:04:00] people who do all of our compliance paperwork as far as state and federal requirements and do all of our a placement testing. And then I have two fabulous clerks here at the district office that do all of our data entry and manage the azella from this end.

Mandi Morris: Wow. So you have a pretty big school district with very diverse needs and how unique to have a job opportunity that opens up and then brings a flood of English learners along with it to schools that, as you mentioned. Weren’t necessarily prepared or equipped. What has that looked like for response for you when you’re, you’re like sitting back like, how do I support, how do I manage giving all of these teachers the supports that they need quickly enough?

What does that response look like? 

Beverly Kerr: Because we do have English learner teachers on those campuses, they really have been the, I guess, first, first line of defense there as the kids came in and teachers are like, I don’t know what to do. [00:05:00] We did have a, we did know ahead of time a couple of the campuses that the students were going to go to, so we did some prep work with those campuses, thinking about all of the things that the students were going to need, because not only is the language different, but the culture is different and the way schools are run.

Is different. Making sure that each kid had a buddy, making sure that kids knew how to get on the bus, how to get off the bus, where their bus stop was, because we don’t have bus drivers that speak Mandarin. Making sure the kids knew how to buy their lunch, making sure that they knew they had to buy their lunch because in a lot of places, lunch is provided.

Just preparing the teachers for those kinds of things. They didn’t realize were going to be things that they had to think about because it’s just so part of what we do every day as as our system works, that it was new for them to have to think through those things that we just do as EL teachers because we’re used to it.

Mandi Morris: Absolutely not just learning the language, but learning how to function in a public school system in the United States and what that looks like. I [00:06:00] love that you were thinking proactively about that and working with your campuses. So tell us some about the, we heard some about the specific needs of your school district, changing demographics, changing needs across the school district.

When you think about goals and priorities for your district, what are you really leaning into right now? 

Beverly Kerr: Right now our big focus has been on long-term English learners, and so I’m a second. I was a secondary classroom teacher. I taught middle and high school, and as secondary teachers, even with a master’s in ESL, I’ve never had any kind of foundational reading training, so I kept getting these students and I was like, what is happening?

What is the problem that we’ve read this text? We close, read a cha a paragraph, and I ask questions and students still cannot answer the questions even though they’re intermediate English learners. They’ve been here since kindergarten, they’re now in 10th grade. There, there was [00:07:00] something missing and I didn’t know as a secondary teacher what that piece was, and I always suspected that it was a foundational literacy issue.

Because if you think about a kindergartner comes in, they’re five years old, they don’t speak any English, and kindergarten anymore is not what kindergarten was 30 years ago. 

Mandi Morris: Absolutely. 40 

Beverly Kerr: years ago when I was in kindergarten, it was all about learning the social skills right? And how to go to school and how to line up and those things.

And then when you got to first grade, you started to learn to read. We start teaching kids to read immediately in kindergarten, and if you don’t have the sounds. To, so if I’m a Spanish speaker, to me the letter A says, ah, I don’t know, that’s a letter A, but I just know that sound ah, exists in my language.

But you teacher are telling me that A doesn’t say, ah, A says, ah, and now I’m trying to hold onto information that doesn’t connect. [00:08:00] To any vocabulary in my brain. And so by the time I’ve got enough vocabulary to start tying those sounds to, it’s January and I’m already halfway through the year, and I’ve already missed half of the foundational reading skills that they’re teaching in kindergarten.

So I was suspected that there was an issue there two years ago, three years ago, I guess this is her third year. So two years ago, we hired our curriculum specialist who has a. She was a bilingual kindergarten teacher who was a literacy coach for our district, was a reading specialist. And I said, I think, and she said, you’re a hundred percent right.

And so that, or at least we a hundred percent think we’re right, but who knows what our data is gonna show. So our focus has been how do we provide those foundational literacy skills for students beyond the fourth grade, because that’s not what typically. Where you’re looking to provide foundational literacy, and if you [00:09:00] are, it’s usually a very small percentage of your population on a campus between fourth through sixth grade or fourth through eighth grade, who don’t at least have those foundational literacy skills.

And it usually ends up being comprehension by that point. And so then programs like Read 180 or anything that focuses heavily on comprehension is gonna be beneficial. So we kept seeing that our EL students kept taking Read 180 and they’re like, it’s not doing any good. Nope. Because they’re reading 52 words a minute.

So no read 180 is not gonna benefit them. Or programs like that, that focus on that comprehension. I. So we started implementing a different program, just districtwide, to work on those foundational skills for older students. And then what we saw was that people were saying they have EL services so they don’t need literacy instruction.

And I was like, wait a minute. One, one is not the same as the other. And I’m telling you from my own experiences as a high school teacher, one is not the other. And so we started looking [00:10:00] at how do we then provide that? At that four through 12 level. 

Mandi Morris: Beverly, in your notes before the podcast, you had written out something and I put it in bold I, and I think it connects deeply with what you’re talking about.

Now, I’d love you to expand upon it. You said language is a universal skill and not a tier three intervention. What do you mean by that? 

Beverly Kerr: So our district is a PLC district, and when we start looking at what those tier three areas are that we intervene on, English is usually listed under tier three. And so the conversation that myself and our MTSS person have had is that really hashing out that idea that how do you intervene in something that a student has never been taught?

I can’t intervene in your Japanese because you don’t speak Japanese. So I have to teach it to you first. So [00:11:00] language is really a tier one. It’s not a tier three. 

Mandi Morris: How has that been received in your school district? And I’m curious, what does that look like in application in your school district? 

Beverly Kerr: It’s been some, oh.

You’re right. You’re, yeah, you’re right. I can’t intervene in something that I’ve never taught before or a child’s never seen before. And so it’s helped to reframe for some people. So what we have done as a district following our state guidelines and our state expectations, is we have been teaching those English language proficiency skills through our science and social studies content.

We don’t want them to miss out on tier one ELA. Even if they can’t completely keep up, they still need to be exposed to what’s expected for a fourth grader so that they can at least get an introduction and then we can intervene when they can’t keep up. But those are two different skills. So what we chose to do, because the other issue we were [00:12:00] running into was kids who are dual coded, that both have an IEP and A language need and.

We were running into, they get their special education services in ELA. We can’t pull them out of that ’cause they’ve gotta have that. So how do we have flexibility with our state model for our language services? So we said, you know what, we’re gonna go over to science and social studies because. Nobody else is touching that.

So that’s how we’ve been able to teach the language and introduce ’em to the language is through that content area. 

Mandi Morris: I wanna go deeper into your model for science and social studies, but before we go there, let’s go back, just to make sure we close the loop on this part of the conversation. You were talking about how some teachers approached reading an ELD and said they have ELD, they don’t need the reading support.

How are you? Messaging that mind, that shift in thinking, that mind shift, if you will. And what does that look like at the secondary level, which I imagine looks quite different from your elementary school level. 

Beverly Kerr: [00:13:00] So as a district, we are really refining our intervention processes with 41 campuses, physical campuses.

It looks a lot different campus to campus. And as the people in charge of our MTSS. Processes have been cleaning those up and working on those, we’ve been working in conjunction with them so that we can get that messaging a little bit more clear that you can’t say one, one skill supersedes another, that you’ve gotta give them both, and how do we give them both?

So it’s been a two-pronged approach to making sure that the kids are getting everything. And through our identification process for MTSS, we take all the labels off. We’re now looking at labels, we’re looking at their orf. How quickly are they reading? How accurately are they reading, and does that mean they need this intervention or that intervention?

And we just bucket them in those different interventions. And then from there, when we, then we start looking at capacity. [00:14:00] We only have one reading specialist and we have 47 kids who need reading. Then we say, how many of them are EL and how many can we scoop up? Provide through el. So we’ve been doing it together at the secondary level.

Our kids get two hours of English language. Let’s see, it’s Arizona, so it’s structured English immersion every day. And so we again created four different levels of courses. And then, so our first level are kids that have been here. They’re pre-emergent, they have no English language skills yet. They typically need all of the phonics.

They might read in their own language, but they don’t read in English, so they need those English phs. So we start there if they can. Again, we look at their orf to determine if they’re reading in like the 60 word a minute area range up to a hundred and. 35 is our cutoff. Then we put them in our basic class, which still [00:15:00] works on those phs, but it works much faster ’cause they’ve got something but we don’t.

So we’re trying to push them towards multi-syllabic words by the end of the year. And then our third level class, we call it our intermediate class. Those kids have all their a hundred percent accuracy of reading at least 135 words a minute. Then we put them into our intermediate class, which focuses on reciprocal teaching and comprehension.

Mandi Morris: Beverly, what I’m hearing from you is you have a very structured response. It’s very systematic. So it’s less of a, this feels good in the moment for this student and it leads to a lot of inconsistency across your school district. You have a very structured approach that you have these buckets. The students are falling in, of course, are always, the students are gonna be on the cusp, but you’re having to make individual decisions for students.

Would you speak at all to the reading program that you are using in secondary for students? ’cause I know this is a. Big need across the country, and I wonder if you’ve found something that’s working great for that [00:16:00] secondary, are you still in your exploratory stage where you’re trying it out and you don’t have the enough data yet?

Beverly Kerr: Well, we’re only in our second year of implementing it. I guess we’re in our third year. First year we piloted and saw some good data second year, last year was pretty decent, so this is our third year and we we’re a lot more clean in our third year here, but we’ve been using Elevate as our four 12. It was a district adopted, it wasn’t an EL adopted, it was just a district adopted curriculum that we use for our intervention for reading intervention for four 12 K.

Three uses, different ones use. What do they use? 95% group or sips or something else? I think there’s three or four different options that the elementary schools can choose from, but for four 12, that’s what we’ve used for foundational skills. Outside of el, I think they’re using iReady. What else are they using?

Read 180. I’m not sure what they’re using a hundred percent outside of el, [00:17:00] but we are using our own reciprocal teaching that we’ve designed. Just taking that, teaching each piece individually, and then having the students practice it. And the goal is independent reading by the end. 

Mandi Morris: So let’s go back to the conversation about social studies and science and how you’re really leaning into language development, language practice through that content area.

And is that K 12? Are you just looking at secondary and then what does that program model look like? 

Beverly Kerr: We’re a little weird in our middle school model. Some of our campuses are K six. Some of our campuses are K eight, and then we have three, what we call true middle schools that are just seventh and eighth grade at some point in Arizona, we went from having the middle school model into these K eight models, and these three middle schools were already established and they weren’t going to get rid of ’em because we have K six that feed into the K eight, so we’re a little wonky at the middle [00:18:00] school level, but the three true middle schools.

And the high schools we do with a focus on ELA and we use one of their SEI classes as their ELA credit for graduation. And then the other courses in elective for K six, K eight, that’s where we use the science and social studies. And so the students are pulled, most of the campuses don’t have enough students at each grade level to divide them by proficiency level.

So you’ve got all proficiency levels in one group. ’cause you might have 12 kids. We can’t split that up. We do have a couple campuses where one campus, we just got 26 kindergartners, which is a, that’s a large group for us. And we did split them and pull them apart because not only are they kindergartners, but most of them have never been to school at all.

No preschool or anything. And so not only are you trying to teach those pieces, you’re also trying to teach language. So [00:19:00] we did divide those. So we’ve had a couple campuses where we’re able to divide by proficiency at the K six K eight. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah, so interesting. And when you have, teachers are pulling and doing the social studies and science, so that’s like a standalone class for English learners.

And then the content, the vehicle for that class is some combination of social studies and science that is similar to their peers, same standards. What 

Beverly Kerr: we did was. It is all kinds of wonky. Just it’s 42, 41 campuses with 41 different needs. So it’s all very, so generally speaking, state of Arizona requires that our students have, in a pullout model, they have 60 minutes of targeted language instruction every day.

For K five and then 50 minutes for sixth grade up. So we do almost a replacement model. We pull those kids out of their science and social studies [00:20:00] class. You’ve got three third grade classes and you’ve got an EL kid here, two over here, four over here, and we just pull ’em all and into that, that science or social studies class with the EL teacher.

Our EL curriculum specialist has worked in conjunction with our social studies and our science curriculum specialist to say. Let’s get this down to the essentials. What is it that our kids have to know? ’cause we cannot cover everything because we have to go to slower pace. Our kids don’t read as fast.

Our kids don’t write as fast. So what is the essential? What must they walk out of this grade level, this content and this. Focus, what do they have to know right in that MTSS model? What do they, what must they know to be successful in the next unit or the next grade level? And so through our PLCs, we identify all of that and with the help of our curriculum specialists.

So from there, the EL curriculum specialists took the essential standards and then built [00:21:00] units for our students using be Glad strategies and. Designed all of our units around those five core strategies, and then we pulled the other ones in as needed. But every unit, because if you’re on a K eight campus and you’ve got a hundred kids, you can’t possibly prep for eight different, nine different periods.

So we build the kind of the shell of the unit with the focus on what the science and social studies want us to teach. And then the teachers elaborate, and I’ve got a whole bunch of pre-emergence. I’ve got a whole bunch of intermediates. So. It’s gonna look a little bit different. Classroom to classroom.

Mandi Morris: Absolutely. Very responsive to the students in front of you, the needs that those students have for this month, for this week. So Beverly, let’s take a step back. Tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you end up in education? You’ve popped around to different states, which I love. It’s a lot of opportunity to learn how people do things [00:22:00] differently in different places.

Tell us a little bit about you. How, how did you end up in education? What have you learned along the way? 

Beverly Kerr: I ended up in education because I loved history and I said, what in the world am I gonna do with a history degree when I graduate from college? My whole life I was a girl scout. I started at eight, went through my high senior year in high school.

When I graduated high school, I was still a girl scout and I worked four summers at Girl Scout Camp and I said, I really like working with kids. I like history. I like kids. I learned from Girl Scouts summer camp that he did not particularly enjoy the little kids. So I went, okay, I can do secondary education.

So I was hired into different education. When I graduated from Arizona State, I had to find a show, and at that time, 26 years ago, in, at least in Arizona, social studies teachers were a dime a dozen at the secondary level, and I was having a really hard [00:23:00] time finding a position. I was also, I didn’t coach a sport, so that didn’t help.

So I was working, I was waitressing. My sister worked in the same restaurant I did. One of her friends worked in a restaurant and his mom was the assistant principal at the high school that I graduated from. And I said, Hey, I saw a job posting on your campus. Tell your mom I need a job. And so he went home and he said, Hey mom, Kate’s sister needs a job.

So they called me for an interview and I had graduated six years earlier and the. There was a four four person panel, so it was the principal of the assistant principal, neither of whom I had met previously, my Spanish high school teacher, or my high school Spanish teacher, and my high school econ teacher.

And half of my interview was in English and half of my interview was in Spanish. And that was how I got to be the sheltered social studies teacher. [00:24:00] 

Mandi Morris: That’s 

Beverly Kerr: a great story. So I never really had any thought. Even doing my internship and my student teaching with lots of kids that had English as a new language, and I enjoyed the students, but I never really thought about being an EL teacher.

It just wasn’t on my radar. I wanted to be a high school history teacher, and so I’m like, you know what? It’s a job. I’ll do it for a year. I’ll get my foot in the door. I’ll get some experience, something will open up and I’ll move out. At the end of the year when they started staffing for the following year, they realized they needed because I was doing halftime, gen ed world history.

Sophomores and halftime sheltered social studies. And so at the end of the year when we realized that our population had grown and they needed a full-time EL teacher, I went to my principal and said, I want the full-time EL position. I fell in love with kids. I’m still in touch with some of them and I always tell them, ’cause they’re like, oh, my astray is so amazing.

I’m like, no, you taught me more about being a decent human being. I ever taught you about English because as a first year teacher, [00:25:00] we all know what we were like as a first year teacher, I didn’t know anything, but I always tell the kids, they taught me way more about the world than I ever taught them about history or English.

Mandi Morris: I love it. So after being in Arizona for a while, you popped over to California to teach? 

Beverly Kerr: Yes. My husband got transferred to California and it was, uh. In and out training position really for him. We were only there I think seven months. I happened to find the one and only job posting in Southern California in February and it was at a middle school behavior school.

And I’m like, yeah, I could do behavior. And I did okay. Probably if I’d spent more time. ’cause we were only there essentially a semester. Not even a full semester. ’cause it was February. I think if I’d spent more time in it, I would’ve gotten better at it. But again, it was, most of them were English learners.

There were actually, I think there [00:26:00] was only one kid in there. There were 13 students. It was a self-contained classroom of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. So 13 students, 12 boys and one girl, and only one of the students was a native English speaker. And so then we, yeah, so we did that for a semester and then my husband got transferred to Las Vegas, and I was there for four years. 

Mandi Morris: [00:27:00] So what did you learn from being in different states? What, like thinking back, what are some takeaways from things that different states did great or things where you’re like, oh, they don’t do that here. 

Beverly Kerr: Most just being in three states. In the three states that I was in, the federal pieces were always similar, right?

The home language survey, the three questions, the, any answer other than English flags the kid. You go through your process, whatever your district process looks like, but they’re all pretty mu, pretty similar, so that was always the same. It was very interesting to see where states were in their development of different things.

When the common Core standards first came out, I was in Nevada and then I moved over to California and it was like California was just a little bit behind. Which I thought was interesting. ’cause usually California’s ahead on those kinds of things. [00:28:00] California was, but it might’ve been the school district I was in.

It was a very tiny school district, so they were a little bit behind Nevada in the common Core. And then I moved to Arizona and we don’t do Common Core. We have our own college and career readiness standards. So then moving here, and it was like. Okay, I gotta wrap my brain around. We don’t say common core, it’s college and career readiness, but all still very similar in that the standard doesn’t have any content tied to it, whether it’s Common Core or Arizona’s college and career readiness, that there’s no content.

There’s no, you have to use this textbook or you have to use this story, or you have, there’s nothing in there that says the what as far as the materials we have to use. It’s just, this is the standard. This is so not a lot of difference between what each state was doing. 

Mandi Morris: So Beverly, you’ve spent 25 years of your career in Title one schools.

Talk a little bit about why you have chosen that path and what that means to you. 

Beverly Kerr: I will say, I have one caveat. I did spend one year in a [00:29:00] non-Title school and I went back to title because as I was getting my admin. Certificate and going out, and I’m like, I need to go see non-Title schools because who knows where I’ll get a job, right?

Just because that’s my preference doesn’t mean that’s who might hire me in the future. And so I wanted to have a broader experience. So I went to one of our campuses in the district and hung out with the principal for a day, and she had a title background. And I said, so tell me the difference. And she said, it’s this set of problems or that set of problems.

You just have to decide which set of problems that you would rather. Work through, right? Because everybody’s got their issues. And I was like, okay, that, that may not, that was helped me see things a little bit differently ’cause I was very biased towards title only. But what I have to choose which set of issues that I wanna deal with.

I prefer the title issues. They’re more relevant to me in my background and my growing up. I was a Title one kid I went to. [00:30:00] I don’t think my campus at the time was Title one, but we were definitely a family that would’ve qualified for different resources and so I just relate better to the students and I see some of the things that they’re missing that like I had no, no college discussions at home.

It was, you can go if you want that. That was it. That was the extent of college for me. That’s what a lot of kids. Our Title one campuses get the parents like, yeah, you can go if you want, but it, there’s no way to assist them. There’s no, and then you’re telling the kid to figure it out on their own, which is good and bad, right?

So I just, I don’t know. I just relate better to the things that the students are seeing, dealing with, working through, and it’s easier for me to relate to them, which I think helps build that relationship with the kid. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. Speaking of relationship, as we were getting started today, you mentioned that you’ve built really strong relationships with students and their families over the years, and that you feel like so [00:31:00] much of that has come from being at Title one schools.

Tell us a little bit more about that. How do you feel like Title One schools has enabled you to build those really strong relationships with families? 

Beverly Kerr: And, I don’t know, being in a Title one school, you wear different hats than when you, than you wear at a non-Title school and one of the hats you wear.

Very heavily day to day in a title school is Adam, social Worker, families looking for resources, families needing help, and not knowing where to turn, and especially when they’re immigrant families, things are so different here, at least as far as what’s available to them than where they came from. So. The students would ask me for assistance and things, and then sometimes I’d say, well, you know what?

I really need to explain this to your mom or your aunt or whoever is your guardian. And so then we would connect, and then I would follow up, how’s it going? Were you able to do [00:32:00] this? Do you need any help doing this? And then I would just stay connected with the families as they were going through their journey.

I just recently wrote a letter of recommendation for one of my students who is getting into applied to medical school. I have another family that I stay in touch with. I’m one of five girls. They had five girls in their family and I had four of the five girls as students, and I’m still in touch with them.

Their dad came and did my backyard when they had to have my backyard redone. I’ve been to quinceaneras, I’ve been to baby showers, they’ve been invited to weddings. So it’s just, I don’t know, you just, you end up with all these students and you end up with them year after year. ’cause usually you’re the only, maybe you and somebody else are the only EL teacher, and so you have the kids year after year and you just becomes this family that you’re connected to forever.

Mandi Morris: Oh, that’s so special. I love that. Is it a proud moment as a teacher when you can see students flourishing in life after school and how special [00:33:00] for the family to be able to send have four out of their five girls in your class? I just love that. Let’s go back to your school and where you are right now.

We talked some about some of the needs that you’re parsing out are students that need reading support and they’re still needing that ELD, English Language Development support and what MTSS looks like as part of that mix, where they get the different support from. What does that look like in your school district for students who are duly identified or you mentioned earlier the terminology uses, I think you said.

Dual coding or dual coded. 

Beverly Kerr: So again, there’s flexibility in our model from the state, right? They have to have 60 minutes of targeted instruction. The only requirement in the, from the state as to who delivers that targeted instruction is the teacher has to have an SEI endorsement. At one time, Arizona required every teacher to have an SEI endorsement.

They backed off of that a little bit, I think with the teacher shortage and things. [00:34:00] Just trying to find people to fill jobs, but our district still continues to require that because any teacher could potentially be providing that targeted time. So for our students who are duly coded, it just depends on what their need is.

If they are in a self-contained special education classroom all day long, then those SEI services are delivered by the special education teacher. We have worked too, as sometimes you, you start to transition those students from those all day self-contained into a little bit broader environment. So we have used our EL pullout classrooms as that transition piece.

It’s a really nice way for them to transition because it’s a smaller group setting. If they’re not up to it that day, they’re not up to it that day and they don’t come and that’s fine, but. The EL teacher already being so in tune to those differentiated needs of kids, it’s [00:35:00] really easy to pull that student in for a little while to just help as we’re moving them from this self-contained classroom, more into a general education setting.

At our secondary level, if a student has an IEP for reading, we keep the student for hour, one hour with us for that reading elective. But they go into a gen ed ELA classroom. ’cause we’ve got two different models that we can use. And then they’ll go into a gen ed special education supported ELA classroom for their special education needs.

So we try really hard to work with the special education teachers to determine how we’re going to provide both sets of services. And sometimes it gets a little tricky, but the nice thing about our services is they don’t have to be. 60 continuous minutes. It can be broken up into 15 minute chunks through the day if we need to.

So that works better at the elementary level. It doesn’t work so well at the middle and high school where you have that traditional bell schedule. [00:36:00] Yeah, so we’ve got some flexibility so we can try and figure out how to give them both sets of services. 

Mandi Morris: When you think forward to your school district in the next 3, 4, 5 years, what are some goals that you have for your school district, for your teachers, for your buildings?

What’s your vision that you’re hoping that this is where we’re really working, this is what we’re working on, this is what we’re driving to, that maybe you feel really excited about and would wanna share? 

Beverly Kerr: One of the areas that we are. Continuing to focus on are those students that have both a special education need and an EL need.

We did our own data analysis and we do as a district generally over identify English learners for special education, which is a trend everywhere, right? Uh, because it’s really hard to decide which one’s, which. We did a lot of work the last year and a half, and it’s still in draft stage and draft form, but coming up with, our district is very heavy on processes, which is nice because [00:37:00] then you can, it’s not a, we feel, we think it’s a, this is the process.

This is the data we collect and this is how we do it, but. We’ve been working with a team of K 12 teachers, EL teachers, special education teachers, special education administrators, campus level administrators, title, non-Title. Brought a whole bunch of people together and said, we gotta figure, figure this out because this is not working.

So it was a lot of me teaching them about EL because a lot of people know about special education ’cause it’s just so part of the every day in a general education classroom. But it was a lot of this, these are the rules, these are the laws, these are the things we have to do. So first it was teaching them that, and then it was, now how do we consistently identify our kids for special education?

So it was like, okay, this campus, what do you do? We do this and this, and we do this and this. And it was like there was no consistency in what the campus was doing. So we also had our NTSS people on there because we’re trying to change [00:38:00] that mindset of. When you bring a student of concern forward, this is not a pathway to special education.

This is how do we intervene? That’s our last resort because we know that we over identify. So we came up with a, this is what has to happen at tier one. This is what has to happen at tier two. This is what has to happen at tier three. And if you have not done each of these steps, then we’re not moving forward for an evaluation.

It’s helped the psychologists as well, because they said they were feeling a lot of pressure to evaluate students that they just didn’t feel comfortable evaluating ’cause they didn’t feel like they had enough data. So that we had psychologists on the team as well. So they helped us map that out. So I said, what do you need?

What do you need as a psychologist to make those decisions and determiners, what data do you use? And so they, they gave us a lot of input as well. So again, that’s all in draft for, but one of the big key takeaways [00:39:00] that we looked at for this was the idea that we need to be comparing them to their life peers.

Because a lot of the time when these kids are brought forward to be looked at potentially for special education, they are comparing them to other students in the same grade levels. Some non-English speaking, some are English speaking, saying they’re not making the same level of progress. So it’s okay, stop.

This is a third grade pre-emergent student. We need to compare them to another third grade pre-emergent student. And that was eye-opening. And then just how do we do that and finding, going through our own data systems and what we have housed and in store here and what can we pull from to make those comparisons, even if they’re this campus over here, in this campus over here.

’cause I guarantee you we’ve got another pre-emergent third grader somewhere in this very large district that we can compare them to. So that’s been. [00:40:00] One of the big takeaways on that, 

Mandi Morris: when you are pulling like peers, are you trying to find students who also have the same L one, the same home language? 

Beverly Kerr: If we can, for the most part, we have 52 languages in our district, but we are predominantly Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin.

So we can typically find a student who is similar, right? Because. We’ve got enough kids of those demographics. When we start getting into those more unique languages, we try and find native speakers of that language within our staff. We have 3,500 people that work in our district. Somebody has to speak to Lugo and they do, and so that we’ll bring ’em and say, Hey, have a conversation with this kid, and the psychologist will lead that conversation looking for specific things and seeing if things are happening so that we can then say.

Yeah, this isn’t normally how this would happen in this language, [00:41:00] and just giving some input so that we can move forward from there. 

Mandi Morris: Really interesting. I love that you’re involving a psychologist in that process as well, and I feel like that, I would imagine is just bringing a different level of learning and.

Knowledge around identification for the ELD specialists, for grade level teachers, for school counselors, I feel like what often happens is that teachers have best intentions. The counselors have best intentions, but it’s like there’s something going on. I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t know what to do.

Help. I love that you’re building out a system to support teachers and everybody else in that process. It’s. So powerful for everyone involved, including the families of these students. 

Beverly Kerr: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And it, like I said, it was a very big learning for me with the psychologist piece because it’s just not a world that I live in.

When you, when you’re a special education teacher, those [00:42:00] things make sense to you quickly. Just as EL teachers, we can talk about L one, L two, and people are like, wait, what? What’s an L one? What’s an L two? And we know what we’re talking about with our own jargon, so it was definitely. Very interesting learning.

One of the next things we’re looking at is speech language services, because there’s so much crossover between EL and just that language acquisition and speech and it’s, so how do we really know? ’cause I’ve sat through many IEPs for, for speech services, and I’m like, that’s a language thing. Is that also SLP?

And it’s, huh. So now we’re, that’s one of our focuses for this upcoming year through that work team that we have is looking at those speech services. 

Mandi Morris: Oh, that’s so interesting. Really trying to parse apart what’s going on here. And often what we need is time and as educators, that makes us uncomfortable because we want to do the best thing.

Now, we don’t wanna move that [00:43:00] student out to middle school and then look back and think, oh my gosh, we needed to do X, Y, and Z when they were a third grader and we missed. Our window, we missed our opportunity. A really challenging part of TR of the dual identification, the pathway to identification, the pathway to intervention services.

Sometimes you just need a little bit of time to collect that data and it’s really challenging. Is there any advice that you have for school districts that are grappling with this? 

Beverly Kerr: I think just bringing everybody to the table that has something to do with it. You’ve gotta have your general education teachers, your EL teachers.

Special education. I think we did a really nice job of just pulling together anybody that had a thought on, on what was going on, and then it was like, okay, that’s a great thought, but where’s the data to support it? Where’s your research that supports what you’re saying here? And then they would bring it back or they would say, you know what it, I guess I just thought, because I couldn’t find [00:44:00] anything that supported that, that idea that was in my brain.

But I think that’s the first thing is just, and what are your processes and getting them streamlined because something else, as we looked at, like I said, trending overall as a district, we did over identify. It would probably still do, ’cause we don’t have everything in place yet, but looking at this campus over identifies this campus under identifies what’s happening at this campus and what’s happening at this campus.

We were all over the map, and I think it’s just cleaning up that process. So it’s the same regardless. Statistics are statistics. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. And you took the time to look at the data across your school district to pull the data to have informed conversations before building out a system. So I think that’s another powerful.

Piece of your process listening to you unpack it. Sometimes we as educators wanna jump to the solution before we have all of the information that we need. And it goes back to [00:45:00] the beginning of your advice. Get everyone at the table that has a thought, has an idea, wants to have, be a part of the conversation.

And then make sure you’ve got data connecting all of the different pieces from a across a building and then across a. School district. I love how analytically you’ve approached that process. I think it’s great advice. We’re coming up at the end of our time. It’s hard to believe. This has been such a lovely conversation.

We’re gonna do some quick just question response here at the end. You mentioned earlier about the first year of your teaching. You don’t know what you’re doing. None of us did. So if you could go back and give advice to Baby Beverly teacher, what advice would you give to yourself back then? 

Beverly Kerr: Oh, what advice?

Don’t worry so much about the content. Worry about the kid. It sounds like you did that. Yeah, but even so, this is like, at the time I was like, you must know who the 27th president of the United States is. I’m almost 50 years old. I have still have to look that up. That’s not important. 

Mandi Morris: I [00:46:00] love that perspective from social studies, like all of these random dates you have to memorize and then.

Yeah, you don’t remember those days. 

Beverly Kerr: Who was your best friend for that kind of stuff. 

Mandi Morris: I love that perspective. It’s so real. What is a practice that you think is making the biggest difference in education right now? Maybe even zooming out. We’ve talked a lot about your school district specifically, but if you were to zoom out, what is something that you feel excited about just as a trend in education right now?

Beverly Kerr: I really think it’s A-M-T-S-S process and trying to change that mindset that MTSS is not a pathway to special education. MTSS is that how do we intervene now in what this kid needs? And it’s so quick, right? It’s a three, three week intervention. Try it, see if it works. Didn’t work. Try something else. And rather than for so long, at least at the beginning of my teaching, it was just like, I don’t know what’s wrong.

And you didn’t bring enough people to the table to talk through it, right? You were so siloed and so that MTSS and [00:47:00] PLC process and bringing people together with different ideas and different thoughts, brand new teachers have incredible. Knowledge in just data, how to find data, how to find things that they’re so much faster at it than I am.

How to integrate technology in a way that makes the lesson interesting. So many times as older teachers we’re like, oh, there are no teachers. I don’t know anything. And we need to listen to them just as much as we want them to listen to us. Right. With our experience, we say, yeah, don’t do that. That’s a bad idea.

I tried that. It didn’t work. So I think that MTSS and that PLC piece is just huge. However it’s being implemented. 

Mandi Morris: Yeah. So powerful. For you personally, what has made the biggest impact for you as an educator? It could be a student, a teacher that you worked with along the way, an admin. 

Beverly Kerr: Hmm. There’s probably one teacher and one student.

The teacher that stands [00:48:00] out in my mind is the teacher when I, so I got my first teaching gig and I was the EL teacher. Did you know that there was another EL teacher at my campus? She was in the quarter way over there on the other side of the campus. Like the principal didn’t even think that maybe we should know who each other are.

So that’s why I’m thinking like that whole PLC thing is so powerful. So at a district level meeting, the coordinator, the EL coordinator at the time introduced the new people to the EL world and she was like, this is this person at pv. This is this person at pv. And I’m like, we’re at the same stuff. But once we found each other, she was a 25 year veteran teacher at that point.

And she helped me see. I was so black and white as a first year teacher, and she really helped me to look at things in a different perspective. And then there was a student that I had who was from the Congo, and I think he spoke four different languages, but English was not one of them. And so we put him [00:49:00] in French class to learn English, and then he had his EL classes as well.

And he was the biggest pain in my. Behind. I had a second year teacher at this point and I’m like, this is what you write. This is what you do it. You’re gonna do it this way. And the kid was like, and he was not having it. And he and I were just, so, he called a meeting with me and we had the French teacher there to help interpret.

And his foster mother and I learned all about this child’s journey to the United States after being in a prisoner of war camp. After being tortured. After being beaten try, he tried to escape. He had been pistol whipped from trying to escape three times. So that just shows you his tenacity, right? And it completely altered the way I looked at these students.

Even though my first year I fell in love with him and said I wanna be an [00:50:00] EL teacher forever, he completely altered the way I saw my students and helped me realize that there are very many different ways to approach the same problem and we just need to talk it out. And ultimately, he wanted to learn English and ultimately I wanted him to learn English.

And it was. Just quit being so forceful. It’ll come, it’ll take time. And you need to build those relationships with those students, and you need to know their story. Because I had another student who happened to be best friends with him, who was from the former Yugoslavia during all of that turmoil in the early two thousands.

And he was also a, well, he was a concentration camp survivor because that’s what they were doing in Serbia at the time. And he and his father survived his mother. He watched his mother get shot point blank. At point blank range in the forehead in this game. And so these kids are bringing with them. They don’t know the culture, they don’t know [00:51:00] the language.

They have trauma like you would never, ever believe or understand or thank God you’ve never had to experience it. And you need to give them some time and some love and some patience so that they can learn. But they’ve got so many obstacles in front of them. And so that just, that just completely changed the way I saw kids from that point forward.

Mandi Morris: Yeah. Beverly, I appreciate you going there. I feel like this is a part of being an ML educator or EL educator. It’s like we have this common understanding amongst us that we have all served students that have incredibly challenging. Obstacles that they have overcome. Many of them, and I don’t know if you have felt like this sometimes over the years, I would feel almost protective of those stories because I wouldn’t want my students to be for their stories, almost to put them on a stage in some way that would like, I don’t know.[00:52:00] 

Take away their privacy or their right to own their story. But there’s this like common knowledge when you’re working with other ELD specialists. It’s like we know the population of students we serve and their needs and you feel you like protect that in some way. And we talk a lot on the podcast about.

Processes and strategies and all the things we talked about today, and don’t as often go deep into the obstacles that our students have overcome to have an opportunity to learn. Here in the United States, we talk a lot about rigor, and of course there’s always this debate of if we do too much feeling with our heart and not enough rigor and expectation that can have its own damage, but.

You can’t be an ELD specialist and not live in that space and understanding of what our students have overcome to be in our classrooms, and it is a different type of flexibility. That is required. I love how you spoke earlier to the veteran teacher who helped you see that things [00:53:00] aren’t black and white, and they most certainly are not for our ML students.

I really appreciate you sharing those stories with us. It’s a good reminder to be grounded and the why we’re here doing the work and why it matters. Thank you for the work that you’re doing 26 years in the passion. That you still have for your students that you serve and the teachers that you serve now from the position you’re in, 

Beverly Kerr: it’s, yeah, I think that the biggest struggle, I think it’s been talking about this a lot lately, and, sorry, a little emotional, trying to change mindset and what the current world we live in, the current situation we live in.

It feels like you take a few steps forward and then so many steps backwards. Why people can’t separate their politics from English learners. I don’t know. We separate it from everything else. There are kids that are sitting in our classrooms that have very different views from [00:54:00] us on other world things, but we can’t seem to separate our politics from the kids who are sitting in front of us.

And it kills me to see how hard these kids are working. And there are people, teachers, educators, they’re like, they just need to keep up. And I don’t know how you change that mindset. That’s the one thing in 25, 26 years that I have not figured out how to move the needle. And when you do, it’s not very often.

Mandi Morris: There is an administrator I worked with years ago, and I love how he explained it. He said, there are people who are unwilling and people who are unable, and that you coach them in very different ways. Some people are both. I, it’s such great advice. I think about it often. That was years ago. It has really stuck with me.

I think that leading by example is powerful. The work you’re doing in your school district to understand the data and to [00:55:00] align interdepartmentally different groups of teachers and specialists and interventionists. That work is so powerful, and I have hope. I believe that the work that you’re doing, it really does matter.

It does make an impact, and for teachers that might be a bit more rigid or frozen in their ways, their perspective can change when they. See, they see a tide moving around them. It can move them as well. 

Beverly Kerr: Yeah. Um, no, I like that. That’s possible. It’s just, it’s just so frustrating because you think you’re starting to make some progress and then there’s bigger world events that influence what is happening.

In the classroom that shouldn’t be influencing what’s happening in the classroom. And I have an EL teacher at one of my high schools right now that when I first met him, we actually worked in a different school district together. And when I first met him, I was like, I was his EL person. And he was like, and he liked the kids well enough.

It wasn’t a dislike of the kids, it was just like, you’re asking me to do so much more. And then I’m like, okay. And now. He’s [00:56:00] one of my best EL teachers, so I know it’s, we ended up in, in this district together, and it’s good to see and it’s good to see, but like I said, it just, it doesn’t happen as often as you would like it to happen.

Mandi Morris: I love hearing that about that teacher, and it’s really cool that you guys ended up in the same school district. He can be your advocate. Look at me. Look how I’ve changed my perspective. Look how far I’ve come. He’s your evangelist. I love it. Beverly, this has been such a lovely conversation today. Thank you for the work that you’re doing.

Thanks for keeping it real and, and going deep with us here today. We really appreciate you.