MANKATO — Katie Schultz has a classroom of perfectionists.

On this late spring morning, her pupils are four energetic boys between the ages of 8 and 12, all recent immigrants from Somalia and Lebanon. The boys spend a few hours each day with their mainstream counterparts in other classes but, for the most part, Schultz is their teacher.

But today, she can’t get her lesson started.

Schultz wants her students to draw a grid in their notebook with six squares big enough to write their vocabulary words and draw a small picture. Problem is, her students want their lines to be straight — so she has to stop her lesson to hand out rulers.

“They all have to be perfect,” she says.

It’s a theme Schultz said she notices every day in her classroom, which was the only one of its kind at the elementary level during last school year in Mankato Area Public Schools.

As an instructor in the English-language learner program at Franklin Elementary, Schultz’s class is designed for the children of recent immigrants who are in the initial stages of acquiring the English language. Her class is a temporary one where students sometimes spend less than a year before “graduating” full-time into a mainstream classroom where they will continue to receive ELL services — likely for the next five to eight years.

In the morning, Schultz teaches language and literacy. In the afternoon, she works on math skills with a slightly larger group of newcomers.

Schultz’s four “perfectionists” are in the morning group, and their moniker is well-deserved.

They are energetic and each raise their hand for every question — almost without exception. Schultz said she reminds herself to ask enough questions so that all of them can be involved.

Conversation seems nearly seamless with few of the language barriers one might imagine in a class of recent immigrants. During her vocabulary lesson, Schultz and her students talk about the differences between “wing” and “wingspan,” why “glitter” and “glider” have difference pronunciations and why the word “headlines” has nothing to do with hairstyles.

When professional wrestling (one of the boys’ favorite topics) works its way into a discussion about the vocabulary word “applause,” Schultz has to ask her students for help on how to spell superstar wrestler John Cena’s name.

But there are immense differences between conversational language and academic language, Schultz said. Her students might still be years away from acquiring the kind of academic knowledge needed to fully illustrate their abilities on a standardized test even though they are able to converse rather fluently. Research, she said, shows that academic language takes up to eight years to master — and these newcomers are only beginning to read.

“There’s nothing to fix with these kids,” Schultz said. “It just takes time.”

Each immigrant student is administered a language test upon arriving in Mankato schools. A few are already proficient enough to join a mainstream classroom and never participate in the district’s English-language learner program, but most have enough English skill to join a classroom and receive a few hours of ELL instruction each day. The rest begin in a classroom like Schultz’s.

In former years, Mankato Area Public Schools hosted such newcomer classrooms at several east-side elementaries, Washington, Franklin and Kennedy among them. Under that model, the district’s entire ELL program was housed in east-side schools with those residing within the boundaries of west-side or North Mankato schools being transported eastward by the district for instruction. The reasoning was that so few immigrant students attended west-side schools that it made little financial sense to employ a separate teacher for only a few students.

But with the immigrant population growing in both Mankato and North Mankato, the district reorganized its ELL program last school year.

Under the new model, all newcomers in grades 2-6 begin at Franklin — in a class like Schultz’s — while junior high and high school newcomers begin at Mankato East. When they graduate out of the newcomer program — there are strict guidelines and targets students must meet before transferring to a mainstream classroom — they move to their neighborhood school. All other students will attend only their neighborhood and receive ELL services on-site.

District ELL coordinator Greg Stoffel said staffing has been shuffled so that each west-side school will house a part-time teacher in the upcoming school year to work with ELL students.

“In the past, some schools had only one, two, or three (ELL) kids, and we couldn’t justify pulling a teacher from the east side,” Stoffel said. “But now, the numbers are starting to creep up on the west side.”

The new model also emphasizes as much time as possible in mainstream classrooms.

Stoffel said one example is using ELL teachers to pre-teach vocabulary words that are important to upcoming lessons — especially in the area of math — so that students can remain with their peers during classroom activities instead of being taught separately. He said ELL staff have become “literacy teachers” to some degree and focus much of their time helping students acquire the kind of academic language needed to succeed in the classroom.

“The role of ELL teachers has changed tremendously,” Stoffel said.

In the upcoming year, Stoffel said the district will be unveiling its first PLC for English-language teachers (PLCs are districtwide, once-monthly meetings for teachers to analyze test data and collaborate on student instruction). He also said the district also has expanded its home liaison program and its early childhood education program.