Julie Melgosa Benmellah

Affiliation

Boulder Valley School District

Biography

I believe every learner deserves more than access. They deserve dignity, challenge, and belonging. When we design with purpose and equity at the center, we create space for learners to thrive with confidence and agency. I’m a multilingual educator, curriculum designer, and systems thinker with over 28 years of experience across classroom instruction, district leadership, and systems-level support. My work has centered on dual language bilingual education, where I’ve led program development, supported instructional systems, and partnered with educators across districts and states to strengthen biliteracy and coherence. I’ve also worked more broadly in culturally and linguistically diverse education to advance equity for multilingual learners through instructional leadership, educator development, and policy-informed systems design. My commitment to biliteracy systems design led to the development of the Framework for Biliteracy Foundational Skills, which is introduced in my book Unlocking Biliteracy. The framework offers a research-based blueprint for planning and delivering biliteracy foundational skills instruction in K–5 dual language bilingual education. It provides clear guidance for how foundational skills develop across languages through a biliteracy lens, distinguishing them from monolingual models and centering linguistic precision and cross-linguistic transfer as pathways to equity, efficacy, and efficiency.