Piecing Together Funding to Support English Learners in Rural Alabama

Over the last 20 years, public schools in the United States have seen a 35 percent increase in students designated as English learners (ELs). These students are often referred to as the fastest growing segment of the nation’s K–12 population. Much of that growth has occurred in places that have traditionally enrolled large numbers of ELs, including states such as California, Texas, and Arizona, and cities such as Houston, Chicago, and New York City. However, recent demographic shifts have taken people from immigrant backgrounds to less obvious destinations, including suburban and rural areas. As a result, some of the fastest growing EL populations can be found in less common host communities such as the Southeast U.S.

For school systems that are new to educating large numbers of ELs, the learning curve can be steep. Local Education Agencies (LEAs) help integrate EL students and their families into the community and are also responsible for providing differentiated programming to support multilingual learners. Federal law mandates that ELs be provided with robust language instruction programs with proper teacher capacity, assessment, progress monitoring, tutoring, materials, and family engagement, all of which require money.

Previous scholarship has found that students with certain educational needs—students with disabilities, English learners, and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds—require more resources to meet the same education outcomes as their peers. And many ELs, in addition to learning a new language, must also overcome opportunity barriers created by socioeconomic circumstances, since 37 percent of them have been identified as living in poverty. This means that implementing successful EL instructional models requires distinct financial investments. While the federal government provides some financial support through Title III and Title I, and nearly every state provides additional funding for ELs, education funding has consistently fallen short for ELs. In fact, across the country, ELs often receive less funding than their lower-need peers.

To dive deeper into how newer destinations are adapting to ELs, we studied a school district in rural Alabama. Russellville City School District (RCSD) has seen its EL population grow by 96 percent over the past six years. As the number of ELs in Russellville City grew, so too did the district’s capacity to provide them with appropriate services. RCSD has been featured by EducationWeek for shifting its approach to educating ELs. So how has the district managed to find the resources needed to do this work, how far has this taken it, and is the approach sustainable?

The city of Russellville lies in a region that has experienced tremendous demographic changes. Between 2000 and 2010, the Latinx population in Alabama more than doubled (from 76,000 to approximately 186,000). In 2011, the county surrounding Russellville (Franklin County) had the highest percentage of Latinx residents in the state. In 2020, out of roughly 10,000 Russellville residents counted by the census, 41 percent of them identified as Latinx, compared to about 13 percent in 2000. About a fifth of them, 22 percent, were foreign-born.

Immigration has been credited with saving Russellville after a new poultry plant opened in 1989 and began to draw migrant workers from other parts of the U.S. In 2011, the poultry plant was the largest employer in the county and today the top three employment sectors are production, construction and extraction, and sales/related occupations. Financially, the latest data show that the poverty rate hovers around 17 percent, the median household income is about $44,474, and the median property value is $97,400. However, the city would be worse off without immigrant entrepreneurs, as a previous report by Colorlines in 2011 pointed out that without newcomers there would be “thousands of square feet of vacant space to fill and plenty of missing tax revenue.” It said, “without immigrants, Russellville would turn into an aging ghost town.”

RCSD enrolls about 2,500 students across four schools in grades K–12: two Title I elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school, neither of which qualify for Title I. Nearly half of the students identify as Latinx and over 54 percent speak a language other than English at home, about 1,429 students by the latest count. This includes former ELs (those being monitored and those who are not), as well as students who were screened for EL services but never qualified to receive them. Over 30 percent of RCSD students were officially identified as ELs in 2022–23, compared to 5 percent statewide in 2021–22.

The EL population at RCSD has been steadily increasing (Figure 1), and even with a small dip during the first year of COVID, there are almost double the number of ELs in the district today than there were in 2016–17. A look at 2021–22 data shows that ELs are concentrated in the younger grades, with waning numbers in middle and high school (Figure 2). In terms of linguistic profile, the majority of ELs speak Spanish, but K'iche' and Q’anjob’al are the second- and third-most common languages among children from Guatemala and Mexico.

When RCSD’s student body began to change, the district had had limited exposure to ELs and their families. Superintendent of Education Heath Grimes took office eight years ago, and is the first to admit that he had limited familiarity with this population when he started in 2015. Grimes told us that at the time, there was no sense of shared responsibility for these students: ELs were only the concern of EL teachers, not other staff and educators.

Part of the problem was that district staff were not trained in EL instructional best practices and were frustrated by low student performance, though they saw no clear path forward. The other, and what Grimes came to identify as the bigger problem, was that there was a lack of cultural knowledge or acceptance as well as some resentment about the demographic changes in the community.

Delivering a quality education for a growing number of EL students would be a key priority for Grimes. He began to ask questions such as: what kinds of instruction, services, and supports should be provided for these students and their families? What kinds of expertise do our educators need to develop? What kinds of resources and materials are needed? And most importantly, how will we piece together the necessary funding?

In Alabama, and across the country, education funding for ELs is pieced together from federal, state, and local revenue. Federally, ELs receive supplemental federal funding through Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which has been traditionally earmarked to support language development, and Title I, which helps support economically disadvantaged children. Title III funds are intended to supplement state and local revenue and are rarely enough to meet local needs. In fact, over the last 20 years, funding for EL students through Title III has actually decreased by 24 percent, after adjusting for inflation. EL students are also likely to benefit from Title I funds because of their overrepresentation in high-poverty schools, though it is difficult to parse how much EL students actually benefit from this funding.

At the state level, each state has a unique formula used to supplement local budgets with the purported intent to help districts reach an “adequate” level of funding. As part of the student body, ELs benefit from base per-pupil funding allocated to districts, as well as any EL-specific supplemental funding allowed under a state’s funding formula. In Alabama, supplemental state funding for ELs is distributed through a categorical funding system that provides a per-pupil amount which depends on the district’s EL population size. The amount of categorical funding per EL fluctuates year to year, depending on the number of ELs enrolled and the total amount of money set aside for these students. This system lies outside of the base funding formula and contributes about 2 percent additional funding for ELs.

ELs also benefit from local general education funding provided to all students, which is a significant piece of the education funding pie. In 2020, nearly half of all public school funding in the U.S. came from local sources. Two-thirds of it came from local property taxes. However, this reliance on local taxes creates inequities, because how much a local community can contribute to its education system depends on property values and wealth, so that lower-income districts are often left with fewer resources. In Alabama, for example, the median property value (MPV)[1] in Mountain Brook City School District—an overwhelmingly white and affluent district with no students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch—was $602,200. Here, total revenue was $64.3 million in 2016–17 (65.5 percent of which was local funds), and the per-pupil amount was $14,772. By contrast, the MPV in Russellville City (where 58 percent of students are not white and 70 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch) was $93,700. This district had $26.8 million in total revenue in 2016–17 (27.6 percent from local sources) and had $10,324 to spend per pupil.

Local action drives state changes

Less affluent districts in Alabama rely more on state and federal funding. For example, in 2015 when Grimes became superintendent, RCSD’s total operating revenue was $24.5 million. Of that total, just 14 percent came from the district itself, a little more than 24 percent came from the federal government, and a little more than 61 percent came from the state (see Figure 3). That same year, and for many years before, the EL per-pupil state supplemental rate was between $50 and $75. This funding continued to be less than $100 per student until 2018, when Grimes and other education leaders began to bring attention to the issue.

It did not take long for Grimes to realize that other districts were running up against similar funding issues. In 2019 he created the Alabama Leaders Advocating for English Learners (ALA-EL) to address the state of inadequate funding, among other priorities. That same year, Alabama added a “density weight” onto the categorical funding for ELs by multiplying the EL count by 1.5 in districts where ELs represent more than 10 percent of the total student population. And in FY 2021 and 2022, an additional weight factor was added for schools that had an EL share of greater than 20 percent. This means that today, districts below the 10 percent density weight threshold receive around $200 per EL, those above it receive closer to $300, and districts where ELs are more than 20 percent of the population, like RCSD, can receive significantly more.

As Figure 3 shows, RCSD’s budget has been steadily increasing since 2015 and state revenue consistently makes up the majority of RCSD’s operating budget for all students. In terms of funding earmarked for ELs, Russellville City received approximately $564 per student from the state in the last fiscal year, an amount that has continued to increase over the last five years.

Table 1 shows total statewide appropriation for ELs across all LEAs over the last five years as well as the per-pupil allocation for ELs in RCSD during the same time frame. And Figure 4 shows RCSD’s EL state supplement and federal Title III funding over the last four years.

Maximizing district resources

Early in Grimes’s tenure, he brought in an education consultant, Tery Medina, to provide professional development to teachers and staff. An expert in linguistics and cross-cultural education—and herself a Cuban refugee and former EL student—Medina brought staff up to speed on the latest research on EL instruction and demonstrated effective classroom practices. Most importantly, however, she pushed staff to learn about their EL students’ backgrounds and value their differences. Without that effort to build cultural connections and understanding, Grimes said, it would have been very difficult to improve the EL program. As he put it, the consultant “imparted so much care for our students that our teachers really love our students and do what's best for them.”

The consultant cost the district about $15,000 per year for several years, funding that others may not have chosen to use that way. But Grimes’s decision to invest in building his staff’s awareness of ELs paid off, as it created a collective sense of responsibility for their education. Three years later, in 2018, residents of Franklin County voted for a 30-year extension to their existing 1-cent sales tax, 75 percent of which is earmarked for the public schools. To keep up with the increased educational need, community members agreed that the school system would need reliable funding. This additional funding allowed the district to hire a system-wide English language specialist and purchase EL instructional materials.

This increase was necessary because while just 14 percent of RCSD’s overall budget comes from local taxes, fungible district revenue makes up the bulk of its EL services. Like other school districts, RCSD’s general operating revenue is made up of a mix of local, state, and federal sources, and it uses part of its general operating revenue for the EL program. For example, RCSD receives roughly $1 million to $1.5 million in Title I funds, some of which goes to ELs, but it is difficult to pin down exactly how much. This is because once funding reaches the district, it is up to local leaders such as Grimes to determine how to best use those funds. In this way, a district’s general education funding pot is discretionary and fungible.

That being said, it is possible to calculate a proxy for the amount of fungible district funds allocated to ELs by taking the difference between total EL expenditures and what the district received from state and federal supplemental sources specifically earmarked for ELs (Figure 5). In 2020–21, for instance, RCSD spent a total of $1,121,502 on EL-specific expenditures, roughly 3.6 percent of its total budget that year. Of that, 39 percent came from state supplemental and federal Title III and 61 percent came from fungible district revenue.

Figure 5 shows that fungible district funds have represented a larger share than state and federal EL funding combined over the last four years. It also shows that expenditures were relatively stable during the years state supplemental funding was increasing, which meant the district was allocating fewer fungible dollars for ELs. The spike in local dollars in the last column, for 2021–22, is due to the influx of COVID relief funding: regular state and federal supplemental EL funds remained relatively consistent, and RCSD used federal COVID funds as it saw fit. These funds were not earmarked for ELs, but RCSD decided to direct a substantial portion of its relief allotment for EL instruction. Without COVID funding, the local share in 2021–22 would have been closer to $700,000, which is on par with previous years.

In 2022, RCSD spent a total of $1,694,430 on services for 773 EL students across all grades. Figure 6 shows the different share each grade band made up of the total EL budget for SY 2022. As the graph shows, the majority of funding went to ELs in elementary school because of higher enrollment in those grades.

When Grimes first started, the model of instruction at all RCSD schools was pull-out. Today, the model of instruction at each RCSD campus is more diversified, with a combination of push-in, pull-out, and sheltered English instruction (SEI).[2] Decisions about which model to use depends on students' age/grade, their English language proficiency (ELP) level, and staff availability. For example, RCSD elementary schools currently use a combination of English as a second language (ESL) and pull-out/push-in services. EL teachers provide pull-out services and EL aides push into some classrooms. Each year, the decision about approach is made based on the number of EL students per class, the number of EL teachers at the school, and scheduling.

Elementary ELs with a moderate to low ELP level, as measured by the WIDA ACCESS,[3] are served two to three days a week for 35–40 minutes a day, depending on the school.[4] Newcomers receive an additional ESL pull-out class four to five days a week for 35–40 minutes.

At the secondary level, EL students may take an ESL class as an elective. In middle school, all EL students with moderate to low ELP levels have an ESL elective class that meets five days a week for 45 minutes a day. EL students with higher ELP levels meet one day a week for 30 minutes with an EL teacher and focus on ACCESS test prep. Newcomers who still have low ELP are placed into sheltered math and English Language Arts (ELA) classes, where content and language objectives are integrated. Similarly, newcomers in high school are given an ESL class as an elective and are also placed into sheltered math, ELA, science, and history classes with either an EL teacher or aide pushing into those classes.

All EL students with higher levels of proficiency in English, and who are close to being reclassified, are on consultative status and may be pulled for supplementary ESL services as needed, including ACCESS test prep.

Staffing and ancillary support

The funding that RCSD has pieced together has allowed the district to hire a full-time EL coach, Heather Godwin. She works with EL teachers to ensure they have what they need as far as instructional strategies and best practices, and offers resources and support in structuring classes and scheduling. For general education teachers, Godwin offers professional development on best practices, instructional strategies, accommodating assignments and assessments, and understanding and following students’ independent learning plans. She also spends time reviewing ACCESS scores, looking at each domain and proficiency level and helping teachers understand what each of those mean from an instructional perspective.

EL aides serve in different capacities that vary by grade level. Those working in grades 3–12 primarily work as parent liaisons, making phone calls in the office, attending IEP meetings for ELs with disabilities, and facilitating communication with families. EL aides in these grades work directly with students if time and workload allow. In grades K–2, there is a dedicated parent liaison, which frees aides to work directly with students in the classroom.

In 2021–22, RCSD allocated the majority of its ESSER funds (78 percent) to provide additional personnel to support ELs. This money ($557,737) added 18 new positions across the four schools, 16 assigned to elementary schools, and one each at the middle and high schools. They were filled by a combination of teachers returning from retirement (seven), regular teachers (five), and EL aides (six). Salaries ranged from $17,224 (retired teachers) to $79,858 (regular teachers).

These additional personnel allowed RCSD to reduce student/teacher ratios in EL classrooms, and some were used to create additional EL classrooms and intervention support. Retired teachers, for example, were tapped to reenlist as teachers and interventionists and provide classroom pull-out and push-in and sheltered English instruction. Additional EL aides assisted classroom teachers with planning, communication, and EL support.

The district also allocated funding for EL workbooks from Continental Press, which provides a newcomer program for students in middle and high school, as well as a literacy newcomer program in K–2, and a line of books aligned with the WIDA ACCESS assessment. Every EL student in middle and high school is provided a Chromebook to take home at the beginning of the year. And while elementary students do not take the devices home, every EL teacher is provided a Chrome cart with devices, headphones, and an interactive whiteboard to use in the classroom. Each EL teacher is also allowed $500 for various classroom supplies. EL funding also goes towards Ellevation, an EL student management system, and a percentage of these funds is used to pay for software maintenance agreements. Table 2 shows how costs for personnel and other expenditures are distributed across the various schools.

Priorities and impact

According to Assistant Superintendent Jason Goodwin, RCSD directs the majority of EL resources to the elementary grades, where the largest population is enrolled and early interventions and supports can help ELs reclassify within the five to seven years that research says it takes to acquire academic English. Goodwin said that district leaders were concerned that “if we spread our resources equally, that five years may expand into more.” Over the last four years, RCSD has seen a return on its increased and targeted investments.

In terms of ELP outcomes, both composite proficiency scores and growth scores increased in all grades of K–5 between 2020–21 and 2021–22. The largest growth increase (60 percent) was in kindergarten, where the percentage of students meeting their annual growth targets jumped from 15 to 75 percent. Growth rates among fifth grade ELs increased by 40 percent, from 31 to 71 percent. And the number of ELs that were reclassified as English proficient increased by 71 percent, from 28 to 48. ELs also saw their statewide academic assessment scores increase along with their non-EL peers. As a result, the district received an overall “A” on its state report card in 2021–22 and was the only high-density EL district in Alabama to receive this grade. District leaders attribute this growth to the additional personnel brought in with COVID funds.

The community has taken notice of Russellville’s increased investments in ELs, and families from neighboring districts have been trying to enroll their children in RCSD. Goodwin said, “this is a population of students that value education, their parents support the community, the parents support our school system… And I value them as stakeholders of our community, because they do appreciate the education they're receiving.”

Unfortunately, the progress that RCSD has been able to achieve stands on shaky financial ground as ESSER funding expires and the district is forced to cut back on the staffing it paid for with those funds. At the same time, the federal government’s support has stagnated and Grimes does not think that asking residents for another tax increase is feasible. So where does that leave them?

By addressing staff biases and knowledge gaps about EL education, RCSD has already tackled the biggest challenge, according to Grimes. Now the district is tasked with ensuring that financial responsibility for these students is shared equitably across federal, state, and local government bodies. RCSD serves as an example of how Alabama’s education funding system, like that in many places, has not caught up to its changing student demographics and their accompanying needs. And while the state has made changes, supplemental funding levels still fall short of local need. This is exemplified by RCSD’s decision to use COVID-relief funds to backfill gaps in EL funding and services.

This brief has shown how RCSD’s approach to its EL population has changed in recent years; how funding has increased thanks to local advocacy; what the district is able to “buy” with its combined, federal, state, and local funds; and the fact that significant funding gaps still remain. RCSD’s journey to better serve ELs and figure out what an adequate education means for them is not unique, and other district leaders grappling with similar issues should consider three takeaways:

1. A district’s culture and positioning in relation to ELs and their families will make or break efforts to provide them with an equitable education.

None of the work Grimes and his team have accomplished would have been possible without addressing the resentment felt by district and school staff. The changes in Russellville were sparked after Grimes realized the state of staff morale and lack of shared responsibility in relation to ELs. Once this care for EL students was established, teachers did not question the need to learn new instructional strategies, participate in EL trainings, or support increased services for these students. They are everyone’s students now.

2. Leaders must continually assess how much funding is being provided to EL education to ensure funding is keeping up with local changes, and that funding responsibility is equitably distributed.

The journey RCSD has gone through to expand the funding resources available for ELs shows what can happen when they are intentionally and consistently considered in budget decisions. With the support of his district, Grimes has spent a significant amount of time advocating for more EL funding at the state level, efforts that have borne fruit as state supplemental funding for ELs in Alabama increased by 531 percent between 2018–19 and 2022. Additionally, COVID-relief funds allowed the district to act on an area of need that had been identified by local leaders. And the district made the conscious decision to use fungible money to supplement its EL instructional budget because its EL programming is more extensive than can be funded out of state and federal EL supplemental allocations. State and federal streams that feed into RCSD, and districts like it, need to be evaluated to ensure that all parties are providing an equitable amount of funding.

3. Insufficient funding requires district leaders to make hard decisions about where to direct resources.

Grimes and his team have made strategic decisions with fungible dollars to increase RCSD’s capacity to serve EL students by focusing on what they know will help these students: more staff members. RCSD has spent significant resources on developing current teachers’ capacity and bringing on in new staff; in this rural context, even one extra teacher or EL aide can make a difference in the amount of face time and one-on-one support that can be provided. At the same time, budgetary constraints have forced the district to make hard decisions about where funding will be prioritized, which in RCSD means that ELs in middle and high school have less funding available to them even though they might have disproportionate need because of long-term ELs and newcomer students. Increases in state and federal funding—both supplemental and general base amounts—would help alleviate these zero-sum decisions.

District leaders can look to the internal transformation that RCSD has gone through as they take stock of their own funding systems and try to identify inequities and shortcomings in their own EL programs. Only then can districts begin to ensure that funding matches the needs of diverse communities in a manner that is consistent and sustainable.

I am grateful to Superintendent Heath Grimes, Assistant Superintendent Jason Goodwin, and Heather Godwin for sharing their insight and experience with building this district’s capacity to better serve English learners. I appreciate my New America colleagues Amaya Garcia, Elena Silva, and Zahava Stadler for their helpful feedback and edits, as well as Rafael Heller and Sabrina Detlef for their editorial support. I thank Katherine Portnoy, Mandy Dean, and Fabio Murgia for layout and communication support. Our work is generously supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation and other supporters of the education policy program. The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of these foundations.

[1] MPV is the median value of owner-occupied homes, not of all the median value of all property in the district.

[2] For more information about these and other instructional models for ELs, please see New America’s “Instructional Models for ELs,” https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/topics/english-learners/instructional-models-dlls/.

[3] WIDA ACCESS is the summative English language proficiency assessment used to measure ELs’ language development. For more information, please visit https://wida.wisc.edu/assess/access.

[4] Although the highest proficiency score on WIDA ACCESS is a 6.0, ELs in Alabama are only required to score a 4.8 composite score or higher to be reclassified. Please see this score guide for more information: https://wida.wisc.edu/sites/default/files/resource/Interpretive-Guide.pdf.