The Changing Face of Inver Grove Heights Schools

How many languages are spoken in the classrooms and hallways of Inver Grove Heights schools? Not one, or two. Not even 10.

Try 25, according to Inver Grove Heights School District Director of Technology and Information Lynn Tenney.

Tenney, the resident statistics guru for the Inver Grove Heights School District, has been watching the racial trends in Inver Grove classrooms with a careful eye. Minority students now make up 27.6 percent of the district's student population, according to numbers released by the schools, compared to 14.6 percent in 2003. In 2010, Tenney said, more than 50 percent of new students enrolling in first through 12^th grade in 2010 were ‘non-white’ students.

So it’s no surprise to Tenney and other district officials that the 2010 census data shows that the population of black, Hispanic and Asian residents in Inver Grove Heights more than doubled in the last 10 years, with minorities now comprising roughly 15 percent of the city’s total population.

While district officials like Tenney have been following the district’s growing diversity for years, in many respects the district is still playing catch-up with the racial paradigm shift that is slowly occurring in its classrooms.

Accommodating A Different Set of Needs

Minority students and students who speak limited English often have different academic needs than their white peers, according to Inver Grove Heights School District Director of Special Services Jane Sansgaard.

Students classified as “Limited English Proficient” are enrolled in the district’s English as a Second Language (ESL) program. There, they spend as many as two hours a day working with an ESL specialist on language skills.

Expanding ESL students’ vocabulary is key to their academic success, Sansgaard believes. For that reason, classroom teachers working with ESL students will often adjust their teaching methods to focus on vocabulary building. To do that, educators use more visual aids in their lessons and even immerse ESL students in group activities that foster verbal communication between students, Sansgaard said.

Accommodating the growth in the district’s minority population goes beyond the classroom, however.

To build bridges with Hispanic families in the district, school officials hired a full-time, bilingual cultural liaison in 2007, and added another part-time cultural liaison this year, Director of Curriculum and Instruction Bert Strassburg said. The district also contracts with “Language Line” — an over-the-phone translation service that allows educators to communicate via conference call with local families who do not speak English.

To help local teachers adjust to the growing diversity among students, the district also invites educators from more diverse areas in to host education workshops. Those meetings, Strassberg said, are an opportunity for Inver Grove teachers to pick up new teaching strategies and a sense of cultural proficiency.

 “[The workshops] provide a frame of reference. Changes are happening everywhere, and other people have been where we are at right now,” Strassburg said. “I think the toughest part for educators, or anyone, is to get outside your box of what is comfortable and what has been successful in the past and try to look at things differently.”

Changing Face of the Schools

 Despite the gains the district has made in certain areas, less than 3 percent of the staff members it employed in 2008 were considered ‘non-white,’ according to district-wide data.

Employing teachers who are the same ethnicity as their students is important, Strassburg believes, because those staff members often serve as role models and are a valuable link between local students and the education system.

Ideally, the demographics of the district’s staff would mirror the demographics of its student body, Strassburg said. But a shortage of minority teaching candidates and low turnover among staff in the district have prevented Inver Grove schools from employing a more diverse staff, he added.

While the number of LEP students in the district leapt upward from 104 students in 2003, to 232 in 2010, the number of ESL specialists the district employs hasn’t grown accordingly. In the 2005-2006 school year, the district had 4.5 full-time equivalent ESL positions spread across six buildings. In 2010, there were five full-time ESL positions in the district spread across six buildings.

Instead of expanding its ESL specialists to meet the needs of a larger ESL program, the district relies on other specialists — including reading and math interventionists who work specifically with students struggling in those areas — to support its minority students, Sansgaard said. The district is also exploring an option that would cluster ESL students at a specific grade level into a single classroom, Sansgaard said, so that the district can easily access and assist those students. Both those options are less staff-intensive — and less expensive — than adding more ESL instructors, Sansgaard said.

Offering diversity-related professional development opportunities to educators across the district is another way to meet the needs of students without hiring additional staff, Sansgaard added.

“You have to make sure you’re using the resources you have in the most effective ways,” Sansgaard said. “The more we can build the capacity for all teachers to meet the needs of kids, the better we’ll do with that population of kids.”

Lynn Tenney believes the number of minority students in the school district will continue to grow as long as there is affordable housing available within the district boundaries.

“I just think it’s an exciting time to be in Inver Grove, to see the changing face of the students,” Tenney said.