I wondered if we could just have a... take a 30,000 foot view for a minute in terms of both over and under identification of English language learners in special education and Why both of those things happen and why it's so hard. Right, right when you look broadly at it really in places that have significant amount of ELL support, bilingual education, ESL support, really systems that are looking at culturally and linguistically appropriate practices, the percentages of ELL students who also have special education needs end up being really close to monolingual English children so that the percentages are about the same.
When you move away from those, you know, and you are in systems that maybe either don't have the resources or are learning about serving English language learners, so there aren't enough services or supports to address their language learning needs. then often we want students to get help. So then often because special education is there, that seems to be the first place that people go. But for English language learners who are really just in that process, who they may be having challenges, but they're really just English language learners having challenges and going through that developmental process, special education isn't where they need to be. They need to have, we need to make our students our English language learning services and bilingual services and culturally responsive environments broaden those programs to serve them.
So that's where sometimes there's over-identification because we don't necessarily have the services that we need for English language learners. And under-identification, I think people are a little bit nervous because they're wondering, well, they're English language learners, of course they're going, maybe they're having challenges because of that. And so people are a little bit nervous.
are a little bit nervous to go the route of special education. But what we know is that our English language learners who also have specific language impairment, learning disabilities, reading, you know, difficulties are really already in our schools, you know, they're already there. So it's really about building systems that allow us to find those students in a timely manner so we can support them. So yeah, making our systems more culturally and linguistically responsive and building ESL, bilingual programming, dual immersion programming allows us to really be able to see those students in multiple contexts that are appropriate for them and we're able to find them.
But I think that's from the 30,000.