• By Lizdelia Piñón, Ed.D • IDRA Newsletter • February 2023 •
The Bilingual Special Education Educator Standards Advisory Committee presented its report to the State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) this month. IDRA education associate, Lizdelia Piñón, Ed.D., was appointed to the committee and testified at the presentation hearing.
“The most important piece to me as a scholar and a mother is that this bilingual special education educator will need to be an advocate who knows best practices to serve dual-identified students while building capacity in the school community for our often forgotten multilingual and differently-abled students.”
Though Texas has tens of thousands of emergent bilingual students with disabilities, the state has not had a teacher certification program that equips professionals to meet the needs of those students. Until now. The Texas Legislature in 2021 passed HB 2256 to create such a program. HB 2256 came out of a year-long initiative, the Texas Early Childhood English Learner Initiative.*
The State Board for Educator Certification is now developing the rules and standards. To inform the committee’s work, IDRA held a series of roundtable discussions with professionals in bilingual special education.
*For the Texas Early Childhood English Learner Initiative, IDRA served as a steering committee co-leader with Texans Care for Children; Philanthropy Advocates (formerly called Texas Education Grantmakers Advocacy Consortium, TEGAC); Dr. Dina Castro, UNT Denton; and Texas Association for the Education of Young Children (TxAEYC).
[©2023, IDRA. This article originally appeared in the February 2023 IDRA Newsletter by the Intercultural Development Research Association. Permission to reproduce this article is granted provided the article is reprinted in its entirety and proper credit is given to IDRA and the author.]