Just days before language education advocates converged on Washington, D.C. for JNCL-NCLIS’s annual Language Advocacy Days, the bipartisan duo of Representatives Jen Kiggans (R-VA) and Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) formally reintroduced the World Language Education Assistance Program (World LEAP) Act (H.R.1572), legislation that would create at the U.S. Department of Education a competitive grant program to support the establishment, improvement and carrying out of world language and dual language immersion programs. Representative Panetta introduced this legislation in the previous Congress, with Representative Kiggans signing on as a cosponsor. They will serve as co-leads of this bill in the current Congress.
“We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Representatives Kiggans and Panetta for their leadership on World LEAP and on our America’s Languages Caucus,” said Amanda Seewald, the Executive Director of JNCL-NCLIS. “Just as we have seen with the World Language Advancement and Readiness grants that the Department of Defense has been disseminating to military connected schools for the past four years, we fully anticipate that World LEAP grants will lead to demonstrable results in language proficiency for American students, leading to their own and our nation’s economic success.”
Specifically, World LEAP will help our education system make progress on several key issues:
Ensuring high quality in-service professional development by requiring a 20% set aside for PD for certified and licensed world language or dual language educators.
Stemming the educator shortage by:
Allowing PD funds to be used to provide pathways for certifying and licensing paraprofessionals.
Providing an award preference for school districts that partner with higher education institutions.
Providing an additional preference for collaborating with states to broaden pathways for language or dual language teacher certification.
Ensuring access for all students by prioritizing awards for applicants that partner with community-based heritage language schools and communities.
Building the teacher workforce by prioritizing programs that recruit secondary andpost-secondary students, including former ELs and heritage learners, into dual language immersion or world language teaching programs.
Developing data on best practices.
As part of JNCL-NCLIS Language Advocacy Days, advocates will be fanning out across Capitol Hill next week to seek more cosponsors for this reintroduced legislation and Rep. Kiggans will receive the JNCL-NCLIS Rush D. Holt Award for Language Service to the Nation in honor of her contributions in the public policy arena on this issue.
See the full text of World LEAP - H.R.1572.