“Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to get the latest news about the city’s public school system delivered to your inbox. Kristen Victorino remembers the moment Newark officials laid out a problem to her in 2023: an unprecedented surge in referrals for students with disabilities. The referrals felt “never-ending,” administrators in Newark Public Schools’ Office of Special Education told Victorino, an associate professor of speech-language pathology at Rutgers School of Health Professions. In a city where more than a third of residents are born outside of the United States, Newark educators feared students were being mislabeled as having speech or language disabilities when, in reality, they were still learning English, Victorino said. She and her team started to look at the district’s data with the help of funding from the Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health. Her team found that during the 2022-23 school year, Newark Public Schools conducted more than 1,200 initial special education evaluations, a rate district leaders felt “was a real surge at that time” due to an influx of new students in the district, many who didn’t speak English, Victorino said. Rutgers also found barriers affecting accurate evaluations of students who came from homes where English wasn’t the primary language, such as an overreliance on speech-language test scores when testing may not have happened in a student’s primary language, time constraints for evaluations, and communication gaps. Victorino’s work with Newark led to a needs assessment that detailed problem areas and created training sessions with district employees and contractors. They also implemented a “train the trainer model” where four district speech language pathologists from different parts of the city receive extra training from Rutgers and serve as peer leaders. Rutgers’ goal is to make the evaluation process more accurate for students who don’t speak English but their work is just starting. They will know if they were successful by comparing future evaluations to prior ones and looking at the percentage of bilingual students identified for speech-language services over time. Newark’s public schools are also culturally diverse, Victorino said, and if evaluators are not trained to distinguish the linguistic differences between English and other languages, such as Spanish, evaluations can get complicated. “So many of these kids are bilingual or in some way culturally and linguistically diverse, and they just didn’t feel like it’s possible that they all have disabilities,” Victorino added. “They said, ‘what can we be doing differently?’” That surge in evaluations came as the district was still recovering from the pandemic, and experienced a rise in English language learners that began before 2020, according to a Chalkbeat analysis . Typically, initial evaluations for special education services are conducted by a team of school leaders, including administrators, special education teachers, psychologists, and specialists who may determine speech, language, motor, and functional skills. Multiple studies show that bilingual students and English learners are often misidentified as having language or speech disorders. That presents a challenge for a district like Newark, New Jersey’s largest school system, which is home to more than 1,200 English language learners who speak Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French, or Haitian Creole. Paul Brubaker, Newark Public Schools communications director, did not respond to questions about the district’s rate of special education evaluations or how many students were potentially misidentified for speech and language services. Most of the initial evaluations for speech and language are conducted by contractors hired outside of the district, while others are done by the district’s Child Study Team members, Victorino said. Data about initial special education evaluations is not publicly available at the state or district level. Victorino’s team held focus groups with district employees and contracted evaluators and found underlying issues. She said there were miscommunications around “what the expectations for evaluation should be, what the district wants to see, versus what the evaluators think they’re supposed to do.” Arlene Hernandez, a bilingual speech language pathologist contracted by the district who participated in Rutgers focus groups and training, said she has seen how easy it is to get evaluations wrong. Across the country, there is a shortage of bilingual speech-language pathologists. “We want to do good for our kids in our community and it’s so important that we are looking at language differences,” Hernandez said. “It’s so important that we are looking at language differences and being culturally competent when it comes to determining whether a child presents with a language disorder.” Victorino’s team found that while there was district documentation to show a student spoke a language other than English, evaluators were not thoroughly interviewing families or noting how much they were using the language at home, making it harder to determine whether students were being tested in their primary language. They also found that standardized speech tests used to measure a student’s communication skills against their peers were leading to inaccurate results. Hernandez agreed that it’s important to test children in their primary language and explained how those tests could mislead evaluators. Show a child from Puerto Rico or Ecuador a picture of apple pie and ask them to identify it, she said, and they may not know the answer. “They don’t know apple pie, but they know flan,” Hernandez said. “So, because somebody has never seen it, does that mean they have a disorder?” A student’s sentence structure could also lead to inaccurate results, Hernandez added. A native Spanish speaker may say “I have bag brown” – applying the grammatical rules of Spanish to English – instead of “I have a brown bag.” “Not knowing these types of differences makes it so that many times children are being referred for language services or for special education services, when in reality, what they really need is more support in learning English,” Hernandez said. The goal is not to overburden the system with students who may not require special education services at all, Victorino added. “Then the kids who do need it will be better able to access the services available to them.” Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org .
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