Multilingual students in Lewiston and Auburn have annually shown success with the national multilingual test. But this year in particular, students have shown significant gains.

The WIDA ACCESS Test is a multi-day test given annually to English learners in kindergarten through 12th grade. It measures a student’s English learning progress through reading, writing, listening and speaking. The goal of the test is to “exit,” which proves proficiency in those areas. 

Teachers in Lewiston and Auburn public schools are reporting the highest percentage of students exiting the test in the past five years. Both credit a more targeted learning approach.

“Our exit rate is up an entire percentage (point),” Lysa McLemore, director of the Multilingual Office for Lewiston schools, told the Lewiston School Committee on June 15. “It’s continuing to increase, which shows the success of our program.”

McLemore said that since the 2021-22 school year, Lewiston schools adopted a new English Language Development curricula and ensured that all English-as-a-second-language (ESOL) students received adequate assistance by a certified teacher in the department.

Additionally, they provided specific training to all new teachers called Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol. SIOP is a research-based instructional framework aimed at making content, such as reading, math and writing, understandable to English learners.  

At the middle school, where the test results aren’t as high as other grades, the teachers used targeted learning intervention methods. It resulted in middle school test scores nearly doubling in comparison to last year’s scores.

“Those numbers speak for themselves,” McLemore told the committee.

Districtwide, 7.6% of Lewiston’s students exited from multilingual learner status, up from 6.8% the year before and 5.3% in 2022. Lewiston has around 2,000 multilingual students, according to 2026 district data. 

Statewide, there are about 7,500 multilingual learners, according to the Maine Department of Education’s most recent data from 2024-25. The state’s exit scores for this year are still pending, but last year, the statewide average was 8.8%.

When comparing Lewiston to the rest of the state’s scores, it’s important to remember that other schools may have as few as one multilingual learner, McLemore explained.

Auburn school officials presented their WIDA ACCESS Test data last Wednesday, reporting that 10.3% students exited testing this year. That’s up from 8% last year and 4.6% in 2024.

Auburn has 328 English learners this year, school officials shared.

Jaye Rich, an at-large member of the Auburn School Committee, said she recognizes the importance of the score improving as a multilingual teacher herself. 

On average, it takes around four to five years to exit the test, school officials said.

“I don’t think some of our native speakers could pass it, it’s that difficult,” she said. “Some of our students take years to do this.”