Over the past few months, the IRC has asked members of our community to nominate Illinois teachers working with multicultural, multilingual students who are going above and beyond, and now, we’re celebrating them and highlighting their work. Keep an eye out for these features in the coming months – and if you’d like to nominate someone, email leanet@cntrmail.org. Next up is Kimberly Taber, who serves as the coordinator for Multilingual & Multicultural Programs for Bloomington School District 87. 

Says Helen Brandon, who nominated her: “Kimberly Taber is the multilingual coordinator for our district. She works tirelessly to provide support for the teachers, students, and families in our district. She advocates for and challenges us to be the best educators we can be through providing professional development opportunities, offering to help us lesson plan, and passing us readings and resources. She conducts family meetings to support the voices of those we serve, and we know she always has an open door and an open mind to support us and our ideas. This is also true for our students as she had worked to help students achieve the seal of biliteracy and scholarships for college. She is the epitome of a great leader and advocate, and for these reasons and many more, she should be recognized.”

As the coordinator for Multilingual & Multicultural Programs for a district serving over 5,000 students ages Pre-K through 12th grade, Kimberly Taber works to ensure she’s supporting the whole community—students, families and her colleagues.

“Our ultimate goal is that the students feel welcome and accepted with their language,” she says. When supporting students’ paths to biliteracy, including the aforementioned Seal of Biliteracy, Taber says her approach has evolved a lot over the years with lived experience and research. The district is transitioning toward a model that supports students as simultaneous bilingual learners, rather than considering their English and Spanish literacy as separate silos, and the district has implemented a new literacy curriculum to dive deeper in this area.

“So many of the students are simultaneous bilingual learners, so we’re making sure that our unit planning and our assessments are designed in a way that honors them as simultaneous bilinguals,” she says. “This is our fourth year offering the Seal of Biliteracy opportunity and so far, 77% of the students who have earned the Seal of Biliteracy participated in district multilingual programs.”

Taber and her team also work to ensure that the district is meeting different needs for different kinds of families so their students can thrive. With newcomer families, she created a welcome packet for families that explains the American school system generally, as well as specifics of the district — how long the day is, how old you are when you take certain classes, etc., to make sure they feel welcome and supported from the jump.

For families who have been in the U.S. for a while, Taber finds ways to engage with and empower them. The district launched a multilingual student advisory council, and last year, the students organized meetings with parents and the superintendent of curriculum. Out of those meetings came a desire for families to learn English, so now the district is partnering with a local community college to offer ESL classes to families at night. The program began with six students last semester, and doubled in its second semester.

Peer support is also essential to student success and a key part of Taber’s approach. She will do one-on-one coaching with individual teachers and support them to figure out how to adjust instruction for their success. She’s also focused on collaboration in curricular planning and focusing on general education teachers who are co-teaching, to ensure they feel supported and the teams have time to collaborate.

As for her advice to fellow educators? Putting the students first and centering their needs in decision-making. She returns to a phrase that Sandy López from Northern Illinois University shared on a podcast, one that is used in many conversations and contexts regarding equity and inclusion — “nothing about us without us.” “That’s a driving thing for me,” she says. “Every decision that we make is about what’s best for students, what will challenge students and what will help them grow the most.”