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The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has ended its monitoring of the Salt Lake City School District’s ESL programs. In 2001, when a complaint alleging that the district had too few teachers trained to teach ESL was lodged, there were only 97 ESL endorsed teachers serving the entire school population although a third of the students qualified for special help. Today, roughly 900 teachers, more than half the district’s force, are trained in ESL. According to federal data, Salt Lake’s non-native speakers perform on a par with native speakers within two years of becoming proficient in English. But last year’s statewide tests revealed that although 80 percent of native English speaking second graders in Utah were reading at grade level, only 49 percent of ELLs had achieved the same level. By the seventh grade, 82 percent of native speakers could read at grade level, compared with only 37 percent of ELLs.
