Several representatives from the Gainesville Immigrant Neighbor Inclusion Initiative (GINI) once again lined up for public comment at a meeting of the School Board of Alachua County on Tuesday. They told the board that Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) is still not providing equal access to school programs, activities and services for students and parents with limited English proficiency.
Veronica Robleto, a GINI leadership committee member and program director for the Human Rights Coalition of Alachua County, said though the district boasted of progress a month and a half ago, immigrant families are still struggling to communicate with schools. She said the situation requires immediate action, requesting an emergency memo from Superintendent Shane Andrew with instructions on how to use LanguageLine to help non-English speaking families.
Robleto also requested basic phrases in top languages to be distributed, for a language access plan to be completed by the end of January and for cultural awareness training.
“It’s not only accessing that line,” Robleto told the board. “People have been treated with disrespect and a lack of cultural awareness. A little bit of kindness goes a long way.”
Adriana Menendez, social service manager for the Rural Women’s Health Project (RWHP), said she gets a lot of calls from Spanish-speaking mothers who are trying to communicate with their children’s schools. She said when these parents call schools speaking Portuguese or Spanish, staff hangs up or tells them “I don’t understand,” or “Speak English, we don’t help in the language that you speak.”
As part of its work on language accessibility, ACPS has created an option to dial 2 for Spanish, which Menendez said is available at English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) schools. But that option sends callers to a voicemail option, and they may not get a call back for days.
Nadine Hyppolite is a Brazilian immigrant who has lived in Gainesville for 10 months. She spoke to the board through an interpreter on Tuesday, saying she had two children in public school until she had to pull them out of school recently.
Hyppolite said that her children were being harassed at school, but neither he nor his mother could communicate the problem with school staff because of the language barrier. She said the problem escalated to a point that endangered the child’s life, so she removed him from the school, and that it was not an isolated incident for her children.
“I’m just sharing a little bit, and I’m not sharing this to bother you,” Hyppolite said. “I don’t like to ask for things, I don’t like to bother anyone. But we’re asking that this law be upheld so that our children can communicate and express their ideas through the help of an interpreter.”
Another parent said a bus driver had left her 5-year-old alone at a bus stop and shut the bus door in the child’s face. She said she feels dismissed because she has made the school and transportation authority aware of the situation, but no one has offered a resolution.
GINI representatives have had eight meetings with school district staff, starting in May 2022, but they said the district has not made enough progress for the amount of time it has had.
“I think it’s critical to note that the families we’ve just heard from are not asking for special treatment or handouts,” Ethan Maia de Needell, RWHP’s immigrant program manager, told the board. “All that they have been demanding for are their rights, as members of our community, to access their children’s education in a language that they can actually understand.”
Maia de Needell told the board over 500 students in the ESOL program speak languages other than Spanish or English. Though the district cannot realistically hire a staff member for each language, Maia de Needell said this highlights the need for appropriate use of LanguageLine, a program which the district has had for over a year, but on which staff is still not fully trained.
Alex Cavalcante, who was an immigrant at age 14, recommended the district have some kind of sensitivity training for its employees to avoid situations where non-English speakers are overlooked for their language.
“This town is a town that welcomes and receives people,” Cavalcante said. “This is a town that takes care of its people. The high school students [who performed at the meeting’s start] sang a song… and there was a part that said, ‘streets are kinder in our home,’ but to these families, the streets are not being kinder.”
Are these same individuals going to “sponser” some of these children’s costs?
How did the immigrants in the past get around language barriers? They actually learned to speak English. They didn’t barge into a community making demands the community change for them. You want to be in this country? Well assimilate then. Learn English just like the immigrants did for many many years. Be grateful your even here. That’s the difference in these new immigrants. You just come here from other countries but don’t want to really be American, you just want all the benefits of one. Schools across the country already don’t have enough funding and are always cutting programs for American children, where do you suppose they find funding for 25 language interpreters? What should American children lose next because you people don’t put any effort in.
Guess what? It’s going to get worse before it gets better. New comers have developed a sense of entitlement. Why aren’t parents and children speaking English–they planned to come to the USA, why aren’t they prepared to integrate??
Every single student and parents regardless of their nationality should be offered equal rights, protections and services under the school board policies of equality. Ms. Hyppolite is speaking of her son that attended Stephen Foster Elementary who was being bullied. Let’s just put that out their for clarity. Nothing was done to assist that child. This why kids bring weapons to school.