Peabody Public Schools has a new district English language learner and world languages director.
Deb Jackson, who was an ESL and foreign languages department head at Peabody Veterans Memorial High School, started in the new role earlier this month. and she isn’t totally new to the job.
Jackson came to Peabody three years ago after working in Woburn, Salem and in Texas in special education or ELL classrooms. She became the ELL coordinator for K-12 for Peabody when then-assistant superintendent Chris Lord, who had carried out the duties at the time, stepped up to lead the district in 2019 following the sudden death of Superintendent Cara Murtagh.
Jackson has advocated for the district to hire more ELL teachers, to work harder to help these students to learn and to make sure that their progress is adequately monitored as they get older, she said.
“A lot of the work that had to be done just kind of fell onto my plate because I saw the needs and I advocated for the things that were missing in this department,” she said.
A native English speaker herself, Jackson speaks a bit of Spanish that she has picked up in classrooms over the years and is fluent in Arabic.
She studied the language in college and was married for 16 years to a man whose native language was Arabic. During that time, she became a liaison and translator for Middle Eastern families in her community.
This is all valuable experience that she will bring to every school in the district through her new role, according to Superintendent Josh Vadala.
“She’s very thoughtful,” Vadala said. “She’s an excellent communicator, and she’ll bring a great lens from the K-12 perspective and make sure that we have continuity and consistency across the district.”
Vadala said earlier this summer that he was looking to hire someone for the role. A designated director of this type would bring consistency to ELL programs and world language classes in the district, he said, especially as the number of ELL students in Peabody continues to grow.
More than 600 of all K-12 students in Peabody, or about 10% of the district’s population, are English language learners. That number doubled from 5% about 10 years ago, Vadala said. Most of them speak Spanish or Portuguese.
About 500 more Peabody students were once English language learners or had a first language that was not English.
“In the past three years, we’ve really tried to add positions that meet the needs of our changing demographics. and so we’ve tried to really provide students support for our vulnerable populations,” Vadala said. “We’ve added special-ed teachers, we’ve added school counselors to work on mental health and we’ve added English language learning teachers.”
Jackson said she hopes to support this population of students and their families better by creating an English language learner parent advisory council.
She will also oversee the rollout of the high school’s first heritage language program, where students will be able to continue learning their native languages of Spanish and Portuguese. Students will also be able to take tests to prove their literacy in both English and their native language, which will appear on their diploma.
“This allows our students to continue to be bilingual. We’re not asking them to give up their native language to come here to learn English,” Jackson said. “We are recognizing that being bilingual is an asset and that they should be proud of that skill.”
Contact Caroline Enos at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @CarolineEnos.
