The first full week of May is designated as Licensed Employee Appreciation Week. At Clackamas ESD alone, we have at least 20 types of licensed jobs, with many variations in those positions. These are people who have completed higher education and earned licenses to be certified to teach students, lead continuing education training for staff, serve as social skills specialists, and provide speech, physical and occupational therapy within Clackamas ESD programs and the school districts we serve.
This Licensed Employee Appreciation Week, we’re highlighting a few of our approximately 185 licensed staff members and contractors to provide a peek into the diverse ways this large group of employees lives our mission of service. We appreciate our entire licensed team and the meaningful work they do.
Leah Hinkle is a multilingual learner specialist in Clackamas Education Service District’s teaching and learning department. Leah supports school districts in Clackamas County and the northwest region of the state in serving their students who speak a language other than English at home and need support acquiring English fluency. English language proficiency is key to a student’s success in all subjects in school, and all teachers and school administrators — not just English learner specialists — play an essential role in supporting multilingual learners’ academic success.
“No matter what you are teaching — whether it’s math, science, social studies, health, electives — it’s important to use instructional strategies that make the content more comprehensible for multilingual students,” Leah explains.
Leah offers our districts a wide range of professional development for teachers and administrators to help them better serve multilingual students. She teaches workshops that train general education teachers on instructional strategies for supporting multilingual learners and workshops for English learner specialists, teachers who specifically focus on building students’ English language proficiency.
“In the past, approaches to teaching multilingual learners mostly focused on eliminating accents and speaking correctly. Today, we focus more on meaning over correctness. We still teach vocabulary, form, function and grammar, but they are taught in the service of learning content. We don’t want to wait until a student is fully proficient in English before we teach science, math and social studies because we know that students have the cognitive ability, even if they don’t have the grammatical correctness yet,” Leah remarks.
Leah also facilitates regional professional learning opportunities with multilingual learning experts. Last fall, she brought Jose Medina, Ed.D., a nationally recognized leader in dual language education, to Clackamas County for three workshops: a two-day workshop on a framework for teaching biliteracy, a one-day workshop on teaching in Spanish, and a full-day session with administrators of dual language programs. This spring, she organized the second annual Educational Interpreters and Translators of Oregon conference, a day of professional learning with sessions in English and Spanish on important topics like translation ethics and AI in interpretation. Nearly 150 school interpreters and translators and the administrators who support their work from across the state attended.
“I’m very proud of our ability to step up and fill a need,” Leah says of the EITO conference.
Federal Title III funding is critical to school districts’ ability to address multilingual students’ language proficiency needs and improve their inclusion in their school communities by engaging their families in culturally responsive ways. However, meeting the grant requirements and maintaining eligibility is complex. In addition to supporting districts’ professional development in access to core content and English language acquisition, Leah is a Title III expert and helps districts navigate the standardized assessments and reporting they must complete to keep their Title III funds.
Funding from Oregon House Bill 3499 helps small school districts with 20 or fewer English learners improve how they serve their multilingual students. In addition to the 10 Clackamas County districts Leah serves, she has taken on supporting seven additional districts outside Clackamas County in the northwest region of the state that received funding from 3499.
“Before 3499, these tiny districts received little support for their English learners,” Leah explains. “It’s really nice to see the difference that I’ve been able to make in just a couple of years. My colleague Dan and I are training the entire staff of one small school district in an evidence-based instructional model for meeting the academic needs of multilingual learners — and that’s a really powerful thing when you consider two years ago, they weren’t serving their multilingual students well. Now they are providing interpretation and translation services to their families as well, and their whole staff is growing in more ways than one.“
Leah discovered her passion for multilingual learning by chance. After graduating with her teaching degree, she sought a secondary English language arts teacher position, but there were few openings. She was offered an opportunity to teach English language development, and the rest is history.
“I’ve stayed in English language development because of the students. Seeing the progress my first class of nine newcomer students made — seeing them start as sixth graders who could not put a sentence together in English and then watching them graduate from high school — that’s powerful,” Leah shares.
After years of teaching English language development in middle and high school, she became a teacher on special assignment supporting a K-12 ELD program before joining Clackamas ESD in her current role in 2015.
“I’ve spent time with hundreds of teachers in Clackamas County, and my hope is to share with them everything I know so they can have those moments of success and see their students and families graduate and succeed,” says Leah. “Oregon is becoming a more multilingual and diverse place, and we all benefit from that.”
