This indicator measures the percentage of students who are Multilingual Learners (MLLs) at each school. You will be able to find data for the current school year, as well as how this percentage has changed over time in each school and in the district as a whole.

The MLL population in Providence, continues to grow, increasing by 2 percentage points in the 23/24 school year. The data shows a broad range of Multilingual Learner representation between PPSD schools. In some schools, MLLs represent more than half of the student body, while in others they represent a very small percentage of the student population. For example, in the 2023-2024 school year, 53.7% of William B. Cooley High School (JSEC)’s students were MLLs, compared to only 2.7% in Classical High School.

While at face value the number of students who are MLLs in each school may make sense given that parts of our city have more immigrant families residing in them for whom English may not be their dominant language, this disparity in representation is much more alarming in schools, like Classical and PCTA, that provide specialized curriculum and course selections. These large disparities between schools may mean that Multilingual Learner students do not have access to the same curriculum and classes that their peers who are not Multilingual Learners do.