Reply to UMC parents in low income schools

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "UMC parents in low income schools"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Agree. I work at a high FARMS school where the PTA president refuses to spend PTA money on interpreters to attend the PTA meetings, which essentially keeps the Spanish speaking majority away from participating in the PTA. When we looked closely at the budget and expenses, we saw that the amount of money spent on book fair decorations would pay for the interpreter for the whole year but the president still wouldn't budge. They said that if a staff member would volunteer their time to interpret then they would be ok with it. Staff members ended up finding high school students needing SSL hours.  The PTA serves the interests of the English speaking UMC minority, and not the majority of the school's population. [/quote]

Your argument makes sense but no fundraising organization is eager to pay the going professional rate for a service that could be donated in kind.  It's certainly not fair to expect the teachers to provide this, but finding HS students seems like the best solution for everyone.  Our school always found parent volunteers.[/quote]

I'm talking about an MCPS interpreter, which would cost an extremely affordable rate. Certainly less than what was spent for book fair decorations that the kids didn't even notice or appreciate. [/quote]

Affordability is not the issue here. Unless MCPS make clear rules on how money can be spent on interpreter services, I would not do that. If you hire interpreters for Spanish, how about other languages? How many parents are needed to get one interpreter? Or only the largest ethnic group gets one?
[/quote]

The school population is over 50% Hispanic. The white population is less than 10%. The entire PTA board is white and are native English speakers. The majority of the rest of the school population is comprised of African Americans (of which the majority speak English as either their native language or in addition to another language) and Asians.

We can argue all day about people being motivated or not being motivated to learn English and whether or not they "deserve" to have an interpreter at meetings. But just like students, sometimes we just have to meet parents where they are. Whether that means scheduling conferences before or after school hours to accommodate working parents (English or Spanish speaking) or providing an interpreter for Spanish speaking parents to participate in PTA meetings, it's meeting parents where they are.

What is the purpose of the PTA?  To serve your own personal political agenda? Or to improve the school in ways that will ultimately help students? Can you really argue that having parents of students that comprise over half of the school population involved in the PTA is a bad thing?  All because having translation available would cost an amount of money that is less than the book fair decorations budget? Interesting way to support the needs of the school you have there...[/quote]

Apparently you did not get my point. My point is very simple: how big does the ethnic group have to be to "deserve" an interpreter? 50%? 30%? 10%? Or if a group is too small, do you tell them "your group only has a few parents and we can't provide an interpreter for you"?

There can be 100 reasons why an interpreter is good, but one reason leading to trouble is enough for not doing it. And I just provided you that reason.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics