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City Translation Efforts Still Struggling
by Tamara Porras

 

At PS. 200 in Bensonhurst, the end of the school day is signaled by torrents of students flooding outside to greet their awaiting parents, their voices filling the once-silent streets.  What makes these voices different from the usual schoolyard din is the myriad of languages in which they speak.  Among the many spoken are Russian, Chinese, Urdu, Arabic, and Spanish. 

New York City public schools are home to families who speak over 140 languages.  56 percent of children are of immigrant descent, in a city with over 2.9 million immigrants. But the Department of Education did not have a centralized system for providing translation and language access services until 2004.

“I don’t go see my son’s teacher,” said William Silva, a recent immigrant from Nicaragua, whose son is a seventh grader at Dyker Heights Intermediate School.  “I feel bad that he’s failing, but she can’t speak Spanish so how would we communicate?  I want to help him pass, but I can’t expect on my young son to tell me how.  It needs to be the school.”

“Language barriers clearly keep parents away,” said Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach for America.  “And because parental involvement is so crucial to a child’s success, this presents a huge problem.”

Faced with pressures from immigrant advocacy groups, the city created the Translation and Interpretation Unit in 2004, headed by Kleber Palma who directed a similar office in Los Angeles.  The department provides document translation in the city's eight most commonly spoken languages: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Urdu, Arabic, Korean, Bengali, and Hatian-Creole.  The department also provides over-the-phone interpretation and facilitates translation in other languages through outside agencies.  In 2006, the city allocated additional funding and pledged increased school awareness of available services and policies.  The department’s 12 million dollar annual budget is the largest of any similar unit in the nation.

“There has been a void here since the inception of the department to offer these services formally…so there is definitely a need that this office fulfills,” said Mr. Palma.  Before 2004, schools addressed language access, “mostly depending on bilingual staff that they had on board or asking for volunteers from the community or sometimes contracting professional translators,” he said.

The benefits of centralized translation are echoed in the department’s initiatives: each of the eight common languages has a glossary of phrases for thousands of terms to standardize translation within the department, in other agencies, and on the school level.  Mr. Palma believes that the department is doing well for being just three years old; over 450 schools used its services in 2006.

But according to a June 2007 report released by the New York Immigration Coalition, the relationship between the department, schools, and parents is still inadequate.  Of the parents surveyed, sixty percent were not aware of their rights to translation services.  Two-thirds did not receive their child’s report card in a language they could read, which the Department of Education requires to be translated.

A parent of a child attending the Hernando DeSoto School in Chinatown, who did not want her name published, is a proficient English speaker but struggles with reading.

"The teachers ask if I want Chinese," she said quietly.  "But my daughter says no; she is embarrassed that I cannot read.  So I trust her to tell me what things mean, like the report card."

Rosalie Eaione, an ESL teacher at P.S. 200 said she was not aware that report cards could be translated.  In her school, they are distributed solely in English.

Joe Taranto, co-founder of Promoting Immigrant Voices in Education, finds the lack of translated report cards inexcusable.  "The city has report cards printed in a number of languages," he said. "Teachers can simply match up the translated report card with the one in English, and check off the appropriate boxes.  But there is clearly a major disconnect here between the city and the individual schools, and between the schools and the immigrant population."

Ms. Eaione thought school-based evening English classes could bridge relationships with immigrant parents.  She thought it could help shyer parents gain confidence, introduce them to their child’s school, and provide information about getting involved.

“If I could learn English, I would feel better about speaking to a teacher,” said Mr. Silva.  “It would be good to get report cards in Spanish and know when meetings are, but I would not like to speak through a translator.  I want to know how I can directly help in my son’s education.”

While there are interpreters at each parent-teacher conference and interpretation services available every day at P.S. 200, Ms. Eaione noted the lack of involvement from non-English speaking parents.

"These parents tend to stay away,” she said.  “You get a fair amount, but as a group, they just aren't as involved."

“A lot of parents feel like there’s no seat at the table,” said Chung-Wha Hong, Director of the New York Immigration Coalition.  “Parents feel really disempowered.  Most schools just ask parents to sell candy…we don’t see any proactive effort to increase parent engagement.”

 

For more information regarding Immigrant Rights and Education contact the following organizations:

  • Haitian Americans United for Progress (718) 527-3776, www.haupinc.org, English, Creole, French, and limited Spanish
  • New York Immigration Coalition (212) 627-2227, http://thenyic.org, English, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Haitian-Creole, Chinese, Arabic, and Korean
  • Metropolitan Russian American Parents Association (718) 415-5912, www.cojeco.org, Hebrew, Russian, English
  • Make the Road by Walking 718-418-7690, www.maketheroad.org, English and Spanish
  • Advocates for Children (866) 427-6033, www.advocatesforchildren.org, English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Russian
  • Asian Americans for Equality (212) 358-9922, http://216.147.28.223/, Cantonese, Mandarin, English

- Magdalena Slapik