By The Associated Press

LOUISVILLE - A Spalding University student wants to prepare future teachers for cultural differences in classrooms.

So Malisa Russell will help launch a cultural sensitivity training program this fall on college campuses across the state.

The program is being developed with the help of professors at Spalding and Eastern Kentucky universities. It will include sessions on teaching in multilingual classrooms, connecting with parents from different cultures and using different learning styles to reach all students.

"You know there's diversity, but what do you do to handle that situation once you get into the classroom?" asked Russell, president of the Kentucky Education Association's student program.

"They don't tell you that in your college classes. ...We want to be able to give them something hard core so they can get to the level that they need to be able to teach every child."

Russell said the program is especially important in a state where about 13 percent of public school students are minorities, while more than 95 percent of their teachers are white.

"If we help one teacher become better prepared culturally and she can deal with it, then you're helping hundreds of students, and if we can touch 2,000 teachers, you're helping a ton of students," she said.

Despite all her training and experience, third-grader teacher Lisa Johnson says there were on-the-job surprises at an elementary school where more than half the pupils are minorities or speak limited English.

One surprise, she said, came when some of her pupils had never heard of the Big Bad Wolf or Prince Charming.

"When I first started out I thought, Well, everybody would know the story of Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood' ... And they don't know those stories," said Johnson, who just completed her fourth year at Jefferson County's Rutherford Elementary.

While Kentucky's teacher training programs expose college students to issues about learning and race, Russell expects the student program's training will go beyond that, offering more practical advice that applies directly to the classroom.

Students who complete the training will receive certificates that count toward the outside training that many colleges require as part of teacher preparation.

The new program is good news to parents like Deborah Stallworth, who thinks diversity training is something teachers should get "from day one, when they first say they want to be a teacher."

"We need those types of things. We need our teachers to understand that all levels of children are out there," said Stallworth, who still gets annoyed when she recalls that the first words her son's first-grade teacher said to her were about filling out subsidized-lunch forms so her son could eat. Stallworth, a recovery nurse who makes too much money to qualify for subsidized lunches, believes the teacher assumed she was eligible because Stallworth is black and was wearing sweats.

"Just because I'm not in a suit don't make me poor and broken down," she said. "It still sticks in my craw."

The need for cultural diversity training is illustrated by education studies and Kentucky's test scores, advocates said.

While Kentucky had some of the smallest black-white achievement gaps in the nation in reading and math in 1998 and 2000, the state has made little progress in further shrinking that gap during the last decade, according to a recent study by the Education Trust, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

And Kentucky's black students, like those in most states, still are more likely than white students to be suspended and placed in special education - and less likely to be enrolled in higher-level academic programs, according to the study, released last year.