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Peter Rosario has spent years watching his teachers help Spanish-speaking preschoolers sound out English words at La Casa de Don Pedro, a Newark-based nonprofit organization that offers support for immigrant families and contracts with Newark Public Schools to provide state-funded preschool.

But Rosario says the state鈥檚 investment in programs like his hasn鈥檛 turned into clear and consistent support for the city鈥檚 youngest English learners.

鈥淲e have to beef up the infrastructure to support them,鈥� Rosario said.

For young students learning English, the early years matter more than any other. that young multilingual learners who start preschool without having learned English can lose months of learning before they catch up unless classes are designed to teach in multiple languages at once. But while state laws mandate that New Jersey districts provide language support services to students, those services are implemented differently from district to district, with no real way to track their impact on preschool-aged multilingual learners.

Experts say that鈥檚 a problem requiring a more targeted approach to boost the quality of instruction, fund programs, and determine what students actually need to learn English.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill proposed a this budget cycle, which would add more than 1,440 additional seats to the state鈥檚 preschool program. But it wasn鈥檛 until 2023 that its codes to include preschoolers as multilingual learners. Before that, identification and language support policies primarily focused on K-12 students.

State leaders say they鈥檙e working to boost preschool offerings for young multilingual learners. Michael Yaple, spokesperson for the education department, said the state is revising the Preschool Teaching and Learning Standards to better align with the revised New Jersey Student Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Yaple did not provide specifics about what those changes would do but said in an email that the proposed revisions will 鈥減rovide stronger, more intentional support for preschool multilingual learners by integrating evidence-based literacy practices with language development.鈥�

But as the number of so does the demand for more services. In New Jersey, 282,000, or 47%, of young children ages 0 to 5, are multilingual learners, according to . In the 2025-26 school year, more than 11,300 students enrolled in preschool were identified as multilingual learners, according to state enrollment data. Across the state, multilingual learners made up more than 152,000 pre-K through 12th grade students enrolled in New Jersey鈥檚 public schools in the same year.

New Jersey is among the states with the strongest preschool policies for multilingual learners, earning eight out of 10 benchmarks measuring things like bilingual instruction, teacher qualifications, and family engagement, according to a from the National Institute for Early Education Research, or NIEER.

But the state isn鈥檛 tracking support for its youngest English learners, according to NIEER experts. While the 2023 state preschool update required districts to identify preschool-aged multilingual learners, the state has no way to verify whether that support is reaching students.

That鈥檚 a concern Alexandra Figueras-Daniel, a bilingual early childhood education senior policy specialist at the NIEER, raised during a June 10 conversation about the state of bilingual education in New Jersey, hosted by the Rutgers University Newark Joseph C. Cornwall Center.

According to Figueras-Daniel and other researchers, knowing how many multilingual children are enrolled in preschool and what type of support they are actually receiving is critical to closing language gaps before they become reading gaps and ensuring students are getting what they need before moving to kindergarten.

The state needs better data on programs that provide bilingual preschool programs to immigrant families through contracts with the local school district, such as Rosario鈥檚, to understand where support for multilingual learners is reaching classrooms and where it isn鈥檛, Figueras-Daniel said.

鈥淚 think we need ways to identify where implementation is strong, where gaps exist, and then where we can really put targeted supports in places,鈥� Figueras-Daniel said.

The gap between policy and data shows up in classrooms too, said Vanessa Colon, a bilingual intervention teacher and community support advocate for multilingual learners who also spoke on the panel.

鈥淪ometimes there鈥檚 a lot of disagreement between what we say and what we do in a district,鈥� said Colon during the panel discussion. 鈥淲e鈥檒l say we support bilingualism, we support biliteracy, but then in the classroom, we make other choices.鈥�

Those choices aren鈥檛 for a lack of standards, Figueras-Daniel said, but for a lack of consistency in how districts apply them.

鈥淚t could be that every district is calling their program or implementing it slightly differently,鈥� she added.

Programs labeled 鈥渂ilingual鈥� are what researchers call transitional bilingual, which uses a student鈥檚 native language as a bridge into English, Figueras-Daniel said. She described one district where multilingual learners receive 30 or 40 minutes of English as a second language instruction a day, but students are having trouble exiting the multilingual status. That model is different from full-immersion programs that teach subjects like social studies and math in both languages throughout the school day.

A true language immersion program is built around a roughly even split between native English speakers and native speakers of other languages, but in heavily immigrant communities like Passaic, Figueras-Daniel said, there often aren鈥檛 enough native English-speaking students to make that balance possible.

Betiana Caprioli, a Morristown High School teacher who also participated on the Rutgers panel, said El Primer Paso, a similar organization with a bilingual preschool program in Dover, helped her own children learn English. That model is the 鈥済old standard鈥� that allows multilingual learners not to lose instructional time while they鈥檙e still figuring out English, Figueras-Daniel said.

鈥淎ccess to high-quality preschool is one of the strongest predictors of positive outcomes for children learning multiple languages,鈥� she said. That鈥檚 why it鈥檚 鈥渃ritical that we continually recognize early childhood programs as part of this system.鈥�

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .听

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