Nearly Half of NYC Public School Students Speak Non-English Languages at Home

Nearly half of New York City public school students speak a language other than English at home, and more than 180 languages are represented, stated a June 16 report released by the New York Immigration Coalitions Education Collaborative, an immigrant advocacy group.

According to the New York City School District website, there are over 1.1 million students in the system, which means that nearly half of that figure would be over half a million students.

An article on the report in the New York Daily News for June 29 noted that the large number of non-English speakers in the city school system presents major challenges for the citys Department of Education, which must, according to federal law and city statutes, provide translation and interpretation services for the parents of children whose first language is not English.

An earlier Daily News article on June 17 cited a New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) survey released the previous day stating that only four out of 175 parents polled said it is easy to communicate with their childrens school. Half of parents surveyed said they didnt understand what was going on during school meetings because there were no interpreters and 51 percent said important school notifications sent home with their children were not translated into a language they could understand.

The NYICs report, The Great Parent Engagement Gap: Report on School Translation and Interpretation for NYC Parents, stated:

In New York City, translation and interpretation services should at least be available in the top 9 languages spoken Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian, Spanish and Urdu according to the Department of Educations (DOE) own regulations.

And most people think that schools only need to provide educational materials in Spanish, as well as English!

Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, voiced his dissatisfaction with the school systems current track record:

Currently, the DOE has only two people who are responsible for monitoring and supporting more than 1700 schools on translation and interpretation. This is unacceptable given almost half a million students speak a language other than English at home. We know that [New York City Schools] Chancellor [Carmen] Fariña, who has a strong commitment to parent engagement, will be just as concerned about our reports results as we are. We look forward to working with the City to make schools more accessible institutions for immigrant parents and their children.

Among the changes that the NYIC wants implemented are providing a Language Access Coordinator in each of the 32 community superintendents and nine high-school superintendents offices, providing every school with a trained Language Access Coordinator at all times, and linking schools directly with over-the-phone interpreters.

The report did not even try to estimate the cost of providing all these additional services and personnel, but with the high salaries that prevail among city Department of Education employees, this obviously would amount to more than small change. (For example, starting teacher salaries range from $45,530 to $74,796 and with annual increases plus increases for additional coursework, teachers salaries can rise to the current maximum of $100,049 per year over time.)

The cost of providing these additional services to non-English speaking parents is, of course, in addition to providing bilingual education to students. In the jargon of educators, students who require bilingual education are designated as Limited English Proficient. While a fair number of such LEP students are the children of immigrants who are here legally, it is also certain that many are the children of illegal immigrants. Whether legal or illegal, however, the cost of educating them is substantial. A 2015 report from FAIR (The Federation for American Immigration Reform) indicated that in the D.C. metro area (which has a population of about six million, compared with New York Citys population of eight million) the cost of educating children who are limited English proficient runs to $2.4 billion.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/immigration/item/21161-nearly-half-of-nyc-public-school-students-speak-non-english-languages-at-home