Closing the Opportunity Gap

House and Final: One-time funding totaling $245,000 is provided for strategies to close the opportunity gap. Provided within these funds is: $28,000 for the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to create a clearing house of best practices for high quality alternative instruction for expelled students; $49,000 for the OSPI to develop a content outline for cultural competence professional development; $117,000 for the OSPI to convene an English language learner accountability task force whose purpose is to design a performance-based accountability system for the transitional bilingual instructional program; $14,000 for the Professional Educators Standards Board (PESB) to examine principles of language acquisition; $10,000 for PESB, in collaboration with OSPI, to convene a work group to revise education related Career and Technical Education courses to incorporate cultural competence standards; and, $27,000 for the incorporation of cultural competency in the teacher principal evaluation system.