GREAT BARRINGTON — As the immigrant population in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District grows, the district is trying mightily to find ways to accommodate those who struggle with English.
Last week, the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee voted unanimously to accept a proposal from school administrators and Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires (VIM) to establish a parent liaison for the district and its immigrant community. VIM is a provider of free comprehensive health care for income-qualified, uninsured, and underinsured adults living in the Berkshire region.
“We’re always trying to do a better job of reaching out to parents, families, and students,” said Superintendent Peter Dillon. “One of our underserved populations is our immigrant community and nonnative English speakers.”
“The school system is not our specialty, but we have kind of found our niche in care coordination for this community, so we’re hoping to hire an immigrant from Berkshire Hills,” said VIM Executive Director Ilana Steinhauer. “Hopefully, a parent themselves to be this liaison and the goal would really be to maximize the immigrant parents’ engagement in their child’s academic life.”
The proposal can be viewed here. First and foremost, the liaison will help educators understand who these families are — their needs, their beliefs, and how schools can bridge the linguistic and cultural gaps between home and school. In addition, the liaison will help “the immigrant community understand the Berkshire Hills school system and all of its resources,” the proposal states.
Steinhauer said the liaison would offer more than a translation service for the Spanish speaking community at Berkshire Hills. The new hire, she said, would also help to “increase the capacity of educators to bring a more shared understanding of the needs of this immigrant community, and how do we better serve them?”
One problem VIM and others have identified is communication. Some immigrant parents don’t use email and, if they do, their children typically do not. At any rate, the liaison would be available to help immigrant parents and students understand all forms of communications with the district.
See video below of the June 17 Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee meeting. Fast-forward to 1:03:00 to see the discussion of the liaison:
The proposal describes the newest immigrants as “frequently in survival mode” and their priorities are simply meeting their families’ basic needs. They are most likely working “multiple jobs with long hours and have challenges of limited, if any, English language.”
Some of them may even be illiterate in their native language, which, as Dillon noted, is typically Spanish, but can include Asian languages, as well. Their methods of recovering from trauma and their “cultural views of education and parenting can be different from American norms.”
“At the other end of the spectrum are the leaders within the immigrant community who act as advocates and voice,” according to the proposal. “These amazing community members require deliberate attention to ensure they can thrive within and for the school system.”
“I think this sounds amazing,” said parent Erica Mielke. “I’m really excited about the potential.”
Mielke said a group of parents at Du Bois Middle School has been working with Principal Ben Doren on a parent advocacy group that will welcome new parents and make sure that all them can be involved and aware of the goings on and feel connected to the Du Bois community.
Doren applauded the proposal from VIM as a broader effort at parent outreach. A middle school group has been working to help members of the district’s immigrant community better understand communications and has software that translates text on the school’s website into the target language of the parent or student.
“The ability to translate on-demand is really helpful for those families, so I’m really excited to try those practices out,” Doren said.
School Committee member Anne Hutchinson said she considered the work of reaching out to immigrant communities “super important.”
“In my work, I come across families with children who literally have no connection to the school because of extreme language and cultural barriers,” said Hutchinson, a retired nurse practitioner who served in the Peace Corps in Ghana and as a public-health volunteer in several other locations abroad.
If the parents can’t read an email from the school, it can create problems for both child and parents. As an example, Hutchinson said an immigrant parent might receive an email from a teacher and ask their child what it means. If the email cited a problem with the child, the child could easily tell the parent that it’s nothing or “you’re not interested in that.”
“They’re in a black hole and it’s super important that we have somebody … because the school can’t do everything,” Hutchinson said. “Someone has got to teach outside the school community and make those connections.”
Dillon said the position would be paid for by taking approximately $20,000 out of two existing grant lines in the fiscal 2022 budget: rural sparsity aid and rural health.
“We would sign and negotiate a contract with VIM and they would do this work as a pilot program,” Dillon explained. “If we didn’t demonstrate success, then we’d either revise it or not go forward.”
