Starting this spring, foreign students will have to take a new standardized test to prove they’re learning English.

Schools whose students don’t learn fast enough will face sanctions and could lose federal funding.

There are about 3,200 students in kindergarten through grade 12 who need help learning English. Some are immigrants. Some are the children of foreign workers. Others were adopted from foreign countries.

They attend more than 90 of the state’s 285 school systems, including Lewiston, Auburn and SAD 52 in Turner.

Currently, schools use their own assessments or some other widely available national test to judge how well students are learning English. Those tests usually gauge conversational English.

Since the federal No Child Left Behind Act was signed in 2002, schools have been held accountable for those results.

The new standardized test will replace those exams. It will assess academic English, a more complex form of language that is needed for school. The test has five levels and a student must eventually pass all five to be considered proficient.

Elementary and middle schools must show that 90 percent of their students have moved up at least one exam level in a year. High schools must show that 80 percent of their students have.

If too few of its students improve, a school could lose federal money, could be forced to notify parents about the situation or could be forced to allow students to enroll somewhere else “because the school was essentially failing in this regard,” said Barney Berube, director of English as a Second Language, or ESL, for the Maine Department of Education.

Too much’

The new English test won’t replace the other standardized tests given to Maine students. That means some foreign students could end up taking two or three large exams in a year.

That much testing concerns Janice Plourde, Lewiston’s curriculum coordinator.

“Now, after they’ve gone through all the rest (of the tests) they’re going to do this,” she said. “I think it’s too much for one group of kids.”

But Berube said few educators have called him with similar complaints.

“ESL teachers have been very, very open to it,” he said. “There’s been nothing adversarial as far as I know, except This is going to take a lot of time.'”

The test has both oral and written components. Berube estimated that it could take a couple of hours for a student to complete the entire thing.

The new exam will be given to all foreign students in kindergarten through grade 12 in April and May. The results will be reported in late summer.

Some ESL teachers have already been trained to administer the test. Others will be trained later this winter.

Maine was part of a 10-state consortium that developed the test. Maine, Vermont and Alabama will be the first to give the exam to students.