Schools
Hazelwood School District Teachers Selected to Participate in Project ELL-MO
The grant supports certified teachers in their required completion of 21 credit hours of graduate level courses for English Speakers of Other Languages certification.
Three (HSD) teachers are among 20 teachers in the state who received tuition scholarships for Project ELL-MO.
Project ELL-MO is a federally funded grant through the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
The HSD recipients include:
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- Anna Koester, Spanish teacher, Hazelwood Central High School
- Tiffany Nixon, physical education teacher, Arrowpoint Elementary School
- Jean Robinson, reading specialist, Jana Elementary School
The grant supports certified teachers who are working to complete 21 credit hours of graduate level courses for English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) certification.
"I began wondering about best practices in second language teaching,” said Koester in statement about why she applied for the grant program. "This opportunity for free certification in ESOL was too good to pass up.”
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The Project ELL-MO grant recipients are also allowed to to pursue a master’s degree in education with an emphasis of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in addition to ESOL certification, something Robinson plans to do.
“As a reading specialist, I sometimes work with English Language Learners," she said. "Project ELL-MO, and the opportunity to become certified in TESOL, seemed a perfect fit to gain a deeper understanding and proficiency for teaching English Language Learners."
The teachers along with all others in the program will head to Columbia each Saturday in the fall and spring, including six hours of outside coursework each week.