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Nevada committee hears bill to require bilingual endorsement, allow $2,500 teacher stipend
Summary
Senate Bill 115 would align endorsement language, require a bilingual endorsement to teach in bilingual programs, and allow schools to grant a $2,500 annual stipend to teachers who hold the endorsement. Supporters said the measure would strengthen bilingual instruction and aid teacher recruitment and retention.
Senator Shelly Cruz Crawford introduced Senate Bill 115 to the Assembly Committee on Education, saying the bill would align licensing rules and allow local schools to offer a $2,500 annual stipend to teachers who hold a bilingual education endorsement and teach in bilingual programs.
The bill as described by Brandon Michelle, an intern for Cruz Crawford, would require the Commission on Professional Standards in Education to adopt regulations requiring teachers to have a bilingual education endorsement in order to teach pupils enrolled in such programs and authorizes a school district or charter governing body to provide an annual $2,500 stipend to endorsed teachers. “Any stipend provided to the teacher at a charter school or a school in a district with more than a hundred thousand students must be paid from the school budget,” Brandon Michelle told the committee. The bill also requires districts and charter schools to report the number of employees who receive the stipend for specified entities.
The sponsor said the measure clarifies an existing mismatch between the Nevada Revised Statutes and the Nevada Administrative Code on licensing language. “Right now, if you are teaching in a bilingual program, you need to have the bilingual endorsement on your license,” Cruz Crawford said, adding the bill “aligns that language together so that if you are getting a bilingual endorsement, you need those endorsement credits. You don't need an additional bachelor's degree.”
Dr. Jafet Sanchez, director of the Latino Research Center at the University of Nevada, Reno, summarized research supporting bilingual programs. “We actually see that they are able to graduate from high school at higher rates … they have increased cognitive skills,” Sanchez said, describing benefits for emergent bilinguals and for monolingual peers placed in bilingual classrooms.
Supporters from education groups and higher education including the Nevada State Education Association, the Nevada System of Higher Education, University of Nevada, Reno and UNLV College of Education testified in favor. Brian Wallace, a middle school teacher and local union leader, said SB 115 “could also be a significant step in continuing building the bilingual education teacher pipeline in Nevada as well as continuing in recruiting and retaining the ones that we currently have.”
Committee members asked technical questions about how the endorsement is earned and whether the requirement might create a hiring problem for new programs. Cruz Crawford and Department of Education staff said universities including UNR, UNLV and Nevada State University offer coursework that meets endorsement requirements and that they would provide a follow-up with exact counts of currently endorsed teachers. Department staff said they can return specific license counts to the committee after the hearing.
The committee took no formal vote during the hearing. After public and institutional support was recorded and no opposition callers appeared, the committee closed the SB 115 hearing and moved to the next item on the agenda.
