Katy ISD teacher warns planned ESL staffing cuts will hurt vulnerable students
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Summary
An ESL teacher told the Katy ISD Board that proposed staffing reductions will reduce grade-level ESL coverage for 259 students at her campus and could raise class sizes and eliminate supports such as GT and dyslexia instruction. Trustees said budget pressures and health-plan deficits are driving 'rightsizing' choices and deferred some decisions for further review.
Rachel Justice, an elementary ESL teacher who said she has worked in Katy ISD since 2002, told the Board of Trustees on Monday that staffing decisions currently described as "rightsizing" will remove instructional supports for many English learners. "We have 259 ESL students, over 40 at the beginner or intermediate level," she said. "The truth is many of our ESL students won't get these services next year and their grades and test scores will reflect that."
Justice said her campus currently has five experienced ESL teachers and a paraprofessional, enabling one teacher per grade in first through fifth. She described classroom accommodations — translation, visuals, pre-teaching vocabulary and small-group or individual instruction — that she says will be harder or impossible to provide with fewer ESL staff. "These students need services such as translation, accommodations, content clarifiers, visuals, pre-teaching of vocabulary, and simplified instructions," she said.
The nutrifying context for the board's staffing discussion is the district's wider budget review: trustees and staff spent the meeting reviewing the health plan's multi-year deficits and a broader budget update that shows flat or declining enrollment and static state funding. Board members and staff repeatedly described tradeoffs between preserving program staff and covering rising health and benefit costs. "We are doing everything we can to keep costs down," one trustee said during the discussion, adding that the district is exploring both market comparisons and internal options.
Administrators told trustees that some program funding (for example, Title grants) offsets part of ESL costs, but that most classroom staffing is paid from the general fund. Chris Smith, the district's chief financial officer, clarified that federal grants such as Title III supplement but do not fully fund ESL positions. "Those grants are not near the level of the general-fund spend that supports the program," he said.
Trustees raised a number of follow-ups: the board asked staff for more detail on the staffing changes that would affect ESL, analysis of where reductions would occur, and options to mitigate harm to students. The board's larger staffing presentation later in the meeting included a plan for a net reduction of 106 positions districtwide achieved through attrition, vacancies and excess-enrollment balancing; staff said they would lengthen the timeline and attempt to place employees in other district positions where possible.
The board did not vote on ESL-specific changes at Monday's meeting; trustees directed administrators to provide more written detail and to return with refined proposals for action at a subsequent meeting.