Woburn highlights $267,000 DESE grant and curriculum overhaul for multilingual learners
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Summary
Multilingual Learner Coordinator Rania Caldwell told the school committee the district used a roughly $267,000 DESE grant to buy high-quality ESL materials and licenses, added coaches and interpreters, and reported gains in student language progress and full compliance with DESE monitoring.
Rania Caldwell, the district’s Multilingual Learner (ML) coordinator, told the Woburn School Committee that the district received "about $267,000 in grant funds from the Department of Education to purchase those resources" and has invested heavily in materials and implementation supports for English learners.
Caldwell said the district purchased roughly $250,000 in instructional materials — textbooks and student-facing resources — and licenses that will support students for six years. She said the district has 14 ML teachers at the elementary level, eight at the secondary level, and added two ML coaches last year to support classroom implementation.
The presentation described curriculum work completed over the summer: 16 curriculum maps with initial units for K–12 and supplemental vocabulary and sentence-frame materials designed to align with the WIDA framework. Caldwell said the district used AI to draft translation charts and then had trained interpreters review them to ensure accuracy.
Caldwell also outlined access and interpretation efforts: the district has trained 14 Tier 2 and five Tier 3 interpreters in languages that include Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Russian and Haitian Creole; purchased AV units to support simultaneous interpretation at events; and placed Lexmark translation printers in every school to translate written materials.
On student outcomes, Caldwell said the share of students making progress toward English-language targets rose from 39% to 48% since 2021, and that the district had achieved full compliance on a recent DESE Tiered-Focus Monitoring review. "Compliance is the floor," she said, noting that the district plans to build beyond those requirements.
Committee members asked about machine translation accuracy, plain-language drafting to improve automated translation, recruitment for LPAC meetings, and cross-curricular use of vocabulary. Caldwell said the district uses review procedures and staff training, and that LPAC and family-engagement efforts are in progress. She described the Lexmark printers as working both from a device scan and via a Lexmark website PDF workflow and recommended using the printer for greater accuracy.
The committee acknowledged the scale of the equipment purchases and the time invested by staff to create curricular maps and supports. Caldwell answered questions about SEAL/biliteracy implementation, progress-monitoring tools, and the role of ML staff in classroom co-teaching and data meetings.