Preparing for 2013-2014 Title III Visit

Iowa’s federal Title III visit will be conducted next school year, 2013-14. Is your district ready to meet with a Federal Title III program officer? To ensure that you are prepared if your district is chosen for a site visit, specific items are required to be in place in your district.

Two essential items, the Lau Plan (see explanation below) and the Home Language Survey, must be in place as mandated by NCLB, Title I and Title III guidance. These two items must be in place even if you do not have English language learners currently enrolled.

Lau Plan/District ESL Plan/Handbook
To match federal language we are now calling the District ESL Plan/Handbook by it’s federal name, the “Lau Plan.” If you do not have your required Lau Plan/District ESL Plan/Handbook written, click here for a template or find the template on Heartland AEA's ELL webpage. Many of you have this plan/handbook already written in preparation for site visits, but have you taken the time to make sure it is current? Do all teachers in your school understand what it is? Do the people involved in carrying out the plan realize their roles? 

Significance of the name Lau Plan (Lau v. Nichols, 1974)
This case is a class action suit brought by parents of a non-English-proficient Chinese student against the San Francisco Unified School District. The Supreme Court ruled that identical education does not constitute equal education under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The court ruled that the district must take affirmative steps to overcome educational barriers faced by the non-English speaking students.

Home Language Survey
All students, ELLs and non-ELLs alike, must have a completed Home Language Survey in their permanent file. Completion of this survey ensures the next steps of proper identification of children who need additional services to learn and function in English. This survey can be found at www.transact.com. Form A is the form to use in Iowa and can be found in 23 languages.

Transact is a service provided by the Iowa DE for all educators to communicate with non-native English speaking families. To access translated documents you must do the following:

• Login by creating your own username and password -- the username must be your school email address.
• Once you are logged into the site go to the search bar and type in “Home Language Survey”
• You will see several versions, but you should open “Version A.”
• When Version A opens, you can choose the language you need for parent communication by going to the dropdown menu in the upper right where the default says “English.”
• Below the language choice, you will see a document type (such as PDF). Some districts print the English version on one side and the target language on the other.