Union Public Schools Plans To Offer $3,000 Stipend To Teachers Who Get ESL Certification

Union Public Schools said it plans to give a $3,000 stipend to every teacher who adds "English as a Second Language" to their teaching certificate. 

It is part of an effort to make up for learning gaps created when kids were learning from home because of the pandemic.   

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District leaders said this program has been around at Union for years, but the stipend was $500 and paid for by Vision money. Now, the district plans to use federal COVID relief money to boost the stipend and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in teachers.  

Union Public Schools said a quarter of its students are considered "English Learners." At Boevers Elementary, the principal said 65 percent of students speak a language besides English at home, including Spanish, Russian and Vietnamese.  

Inside her kindergarten class, teacher Megan Nigam said she has a different approach with her students, because she is certified in "English as a Second Language." 

"The beautiful thing about Kindergarten is that they're all learning language all the time,” Nigam said.  

She took the test in 2019 and got her $500 stipend. 

"It is strictly about how to teach students to learn in English,” she said.  

Now that the district is offering a $3,000 stipend for teachers who get certified in ESL, Nigam and more than 100 other teachers who earned certification earlier, will get back pay.  It means an extra $2,500 each of those teachers were not initially expecting.  

"The money was not the motivator for me; that's like an awesome bonus. And so the $500, I was like, 'Great, that's wonderful.' But when they said that it was gonna be a $2,500 stipend like in addition to that, I was completely shocked. That was a sweet surprise,” Nigam said.  

As the district’s Senior Executive Director of Research, Design and Assessment, Todd Nelson looks at student data across the district. He said state test results for English Language Arts among Union's third graders shows just 15 percent of students scored proficient or advanced this year.  

"It's well below where we want that to be, and where we've been,” Nelson said.  

Now the district is hoping this incentive will lead to a stronger approach to language barriers. 

Union said it does still need approval from the state before the stipends become a reality, but it expects that to happen soon. The district said it would like to see every teacher take advantage of this opportunity. 

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