TESTIMONY OF THE
Presented at the Board of Education by Cindy Kerr, President
September 26, 2005
Good Evening President O’Neill and Members of the Board of Education:
I am Cindy Kerr, President of the
Please let me take a moment to publicly share my
condolences with the families who have lost their beloved children and pledge
my wholehearted efforts on behalf of MCCPTA to work with all the pillars of our
community-- our schools, our police and our elected officials to find the
creative solutions that will protect all children.
I am here tonight to address your Agenda item regarding Language
Assistance Services Provided by MCPS to parents within our school community.
Though this item is on the Agenda for discussion only, we are here to
urge you to take action.
Last year, MCCPTA worked with our local school representatives to develop a
list of advocacy priorities for the 2004-05 academic year.
Our delegates indicated that the most pressing obstacle to parent involvement
in our County was “inadequate resources devoted by MCPS to improve
communication with non-English speaking parents”. The need for more and
better translation services is a critical element of improving communications
with non-English speaking and limited English proficient families.
Extensive scholarly research has documented what we all understand intuitively,
that student success depends upon parent involvement. The more we can
engage parents as active partners in education, the more likely we are to see
more children flourish. From the PTA perspective we struggle with inadequate
resources to translate PTA meetings. We struggle to help parents
understand critical documents that are sent home in English only. We hear
repeatedly about the heartbreak of parents contacting their child’s school to
ask questions but there is no bilingual staff member in the front office to
answer them. But perhaps most importantly, we struggle to reach out to our
limited English proficient parents who often do not even cross the school door
threshold because they feel unwelcome or intimidated by an alien culture and
English only instructions.
This summer the MCCPTA Officers again visited each of our local areas. We
heard loud and clear a cry for more full time parent community outreach
coordinators. These staff members are the lifeline that reaches out to
our limited English proficient families and works with them one on one to
overcome the barriers that are keeping them from more active participation in
our school communities. Many of our local schools are embracing the Conquista tus Suenos
program as a first step in reaching out to Latino parents and guardians but
need the support of parent community outreach coordinators to maintain the
connections which are developed. In addition, the need exists beyond the
boundaries of the Latino community to the multiple other language speakers who
cannot be served by Conquista program.
So we urge you tonight to direct attention and dollars to reach those parents
for whom barriers of language, culture, and access stand in the way of full
participation in their child’s education. We support the recommendation
of the County Council’s Office of Legislative Oversight. Many of our PTAs
have to go to great lengths to discover what translation and interpretation
services exist within MCPS. Little of that information is shared
routinely with schools resulting in a wide variance of resources usage among our
local communities. So we urge MCPS to take the imitative for providing
this information directly to all schools and PTAs. In addition, MCCPTA requests
that MCPS:
· allocate sufficient funds in its FY2007 Operating
Budget to purchase a set of translation devices and headphones for each cluster
which would be available on an as needed lending basis to our local PTAs;
· allocate sufficient funds to support bi-lingual
parent community coordinators in all schools with a significant limited
English proficient parent population. Due to the nature of the
relationship building work, we urge that these staff be assigned to one school
and not divided among all the schools in a cluster;
· ensure access to bilingual counselors for all
schools as a resources for students and parents;
· ensure that adequate translators are available for
parent teacher conferences;
· ensure that all MCPS documents for distribution
through our schools are translated in a timely manner and that translation
support is also made available to PTAs which need to translate announcements of
parent meetings or parent to parent newsletter and finally
· ensure that greater efforts are undertaken to
recruit and retain multi-lingual front office staff in each of our local
schools and to publicize the availability of the Language Line phone
translation services as a second best alternative.
As always, MCCPTA stands ready to support your efforts to remove the barriers
to parent involvement for our limited English proficient families.