Texas Charter School Begins Partnership with MELC
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact(s):
Brittany Taylor / Jim Croswell
btaylor@iltexas.org / jcroswell@iltexas.org
(832) 244-4847 / (210) 862-7453
Texas Charter School Begins Partnership with MELC
RICHARDSON, TEXAS – International Leadership of Texas (ILTexas) has the honor to announce a new partnership with MELC. MELC, whose trademark is Magister is the largest teacher training center in Spain. MELC operates out of Madrid, with more than 60 years of experience in training teachers through its own courses and those delivered by its university centers network. Through this agreement, ILTexas has become connected with Universidad Camilo José Cela, Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Centro Universitario Villanueva, and the Federación de Escuelas de Español como Lengua Extranjera (FEDELE).
This new partnership with MELC was created to facilitate a better language learning environment. Through the agreement, teachers in Spain and Texas will exchange and have the opportunity to teach their native language in foreign countries. Teachers also have the opportunity to take classes, go to professional development, and collaborate as research groups and create scientific publications about foreign language teaching.
It is the mission of ILTexas to “prepare students for exceptional leadership roles in the international community by emphasizing servant leadership, mastering the English, Spanish, and Chinese languages, and strengthening the mind, body and character”. At ILTexas, all students are required to master the English, Spanish and Chinese Languages. The purpose of this idea is to help students understand leadership and business from a global perspective. One of the principals of this unprecedented education model is to reinforce language acquisition with authentic cultural experience.
One of the pillars of the ILTexas curriculum is to have native language speakers as the students’ instructors. To meet current language demand in its schools, ILTexas will host 94 international teachers from China and Spain for the 2016-2017 school year. It is through the new partnership with MELC that ILTexas will have access to the projected 161 teachers necessary to facilitate the 29,000 students expected to attend ILTexas schools in 2017-2018.
“This is just the first phase of this partnership that will open the doors of ILTexas Spain” Said Dr. Laura Carrasco, the ILTexas Chief Academic Officer.
International Leadership of Texas - Global, a separate but supporting non-profit for the ILTexas Charter School District, is looking to expand education in an innovative new way. It is the goal of ILTexas to have schools in both China and Spain which use the ILTexas curriculum. Using the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills curriculum (TEKS), the students will be taught the same college-preparatory curriculum as their peers in Texas. This will allow American, Chinese, and Spanish students and teachers to transition back and forth between countries with no interruption to the students’ curriculum schedule.
