Brewer asks about bilingual teacher shortages and recruitment

Okay.

I mean, we'll keep working on the Russian then.

My question also is, I know you talked about the teachers and the workforce.

Do you have enough teachers in these different languages, or is there a shortage?

Is that something that is able to be addressed, or is that you've got so many different languages?

I will just say broadly and then turn to my colleagues to speak to some of the particulars.

We know that as we continue to expand access to early childhood education broadly and specifically to support more and more of our multilingual learners, we cannot do that without investing in the workforce.

And so as we continue to invest in workforce development for early childhood education,

we need to continue both bringing multilingual educators into the pipeline and supporting those who are already in our system to get their bilingual extension or otherwise develop the skills to support multilingual learners.

But I'll pass to my colleagues.

So how are you doing that?

Are you calling the United Nations?

No, I'm serious.

I mean, I think at a high level, as we think about...

You know, how we promote the jobs in early childhood education, doing outreach to diverse communities in New York City.

We have so many multilingual speakers in New York City.

So making sure that we are reaching them in the communities where they are, partnering with institutions of higher education who are serving a multilingual student population,

as well as working with existing teachers in our early childhood and K-12 system who want to go back to school and earn their bilingual extensions so that they can teach in a formally designated class.

We also, as my colleagues have mentioned, provide on-site coaching and professional development so that all teachers are equipped to support multilingual learners.

ever their own language skills might be.

Okay.

And I will just add on to that, the intentional strategy as we are expanding and working with community-based providers and also family child care providers is bringing in

educators who have very different linguistic assets and they're able to match their communities.

So that's a very intentional way of trying to ensure that we have educators who understand the multilingual backgrounds that our children are coming in with.

Okay.

I'm always trying to get more parents to send their children to public school.

So one of the things that you're great at is what you're talking about.

What you're horrible at is telling people what you do.

Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.

So my suggestion would be, again, trying to think of ways.

I'm not a charter school supporter, I'll be honest with you.

And so I'm trying to get more students to go to your school.

So maybe you could do some information nicely laid out, not D-O-E laid out, and be able to tell people, because all Americans should speak two languages, every single one.

But the question is, you have to tell people that you're teaching two languages.

Because I have to tell you, if you ask the general public who doesn't have a child in the public schools, who's always complaining, they're going to say, we do not have dual language or anything.

So when you have that material, could you let me know?

Thank you.