Dear Welcoming Community, is your school system rolling
in dough? Posted by Ann Corcoran on July 3, 2016
Are your local
taxpayers ready to pay for a “NEW REALITY”—that they must pay for the
translation services that the federal government is now demanding in immigrant
‘rich’ towns and cities. Diversity isn’t strength, but it is expensive!
In Bill’s last
months in office he left a ‘legacy’ of executive orders and one (order #13166 )
said that any institution receiving federal funds was required to provide
interpreters. So, today you see medical facilities, school systems and the
criminal justice system paying for expensive interpreters as refugees are
spread out to more and more small cities and towns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13166
This is a
lengthy story that everyone in towns anticipating refugee arrivals must read.
From the Hechinger
Report which features Syracuse, NY as its star
of story (the city where a Catholic
Church has become a
mosque when refugee numbers expanded):
The Bhutanese
population has grown into a flourishing, tightly knit group of about 3,000
people. They are part of a substantial refugee population from South Asia,
Africa and the Middle East that has transformed the city and its schools.
Students in the Syracuse City School District speak more than 70 different
languages and four of the most common among them are Nepali, Karen, Somali, and
Arabic. [Arabic is the number one
language spoken by refugees entering the US, see
here.—ed]
In 2010, to
better serve this population, the Syracuse City school District created a new
position — nationality workers — to serve as a bridge between new immigrant
communities and the schools.
I’ll bet the federal
refugee contractor trying to sell your town a bill of goods (they say the feds
pay for everything!), never mentioned this:
A failure to
communicate effectively with immigrant parents is a violation of their civil
rights, considered discrimination based on national origin, which is prohibited
by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Without language services,
non-English-speaking parents are considered to be blocked from equal access to
school information and resources.
As refugees spread out across the U.S.,
settling in the Southeast, Midwest, and many rural areas that, before, were
fairly insulated from large immigrant populations, schools are being forced to
adapt to a new reality.
Syracuse is one
of the more proactive districts when it comes to providing language access.
While it struggles, at times, to meet its obligations, districts in other
cities and states have fared worse. Dozens have been investigated by the Office of
Civil Rights or the Department of Justice in recent years following complaints
that they did not provide interpreters or translated materials to parents who
needed them. These schools are in Yuma, Arizona; New Orleans, Louisiana;
Richmond, Virginia; Detroit, Michigan; Modesto, California; and Seattle,
Washington, among others.
The legal rationale
for language access requirements has existed for decades, but the Obama
administration has been more aggressive than others in holding schools
accountable. [Not surprising!—ed]
While the Civil
Rights Act doesn’t specifically require schools to offer interpretation and
translation services to parents — or any special supports for their
non-English-speaking children – it bars discrimination based on national origin
in any program or activity receiving federal dollars. The courts have
consistently relied on this rationale to require schools to provide these
services, and a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Education Department’s Office
of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice in 2015 went into explicit detail
about what schools have to do to communicate with immigrant parents.
Read
it all and get ready
Reno, NV, Rutland, VT, Ithaca, NY, Missoula, MT, Asheville, NC, Fayetteville,
AR, Charleston, WV, etc. Have you got your Arabic interpreters lined up? And, you know
what is really funny, often the well-paid interpreters are refugees themselves
(just as in this story) and the contractors can crow about how refugees find
jobs!
You might want
to look for other stories here at RRW involving interpreters because there have
been refugee criminals who got off the hook because of poor language
translation by court-appointed interpreters.
P.S. If you
want to know more about Bhutanese refugees (not Muslims), click here, because we have followed their
arrival in America since George W. Bush welcomed 60,000 of them in 2007 (we are
now probably looking at (at least) 80,000).
Vermont Health Department concealing number of
refugees with contagious TB, By Bruce Parker
/ June 27, 2016
BURLINGTON,
Vt. — Epidemiologists at the Vermont Department of Health are concealing the number of refugees with contagious
active tuberculosis nearly a month after Watchdog reported that more
than one-third of Vermont’s resettled refugees test positive for TB.
Earlier
this month, Watchdog revealed that 35 percent of Vermont’s
incoming refugees in the past four years tested positive
for tuberculosis.How
many of those cases are contagious and symptomatic, however, remains a
secret, as state epidemiologists and top officials at the Health
Department have spent weeks blocking efforts to obtain the data.
Refugees
brought to the United States take TB tests as part of comprehensive
health screening. For refugees resettled in
Vermont, the Department of Health’s Refugee Health Program
monitors test results and treats patients who have active TB
disease. Unlike latent tuberculosis infection, active TB disease is contagious,
symptomatic and even deadly.
According
to documents obtained through a public records request, the evasions began May
27, when Watchdog contacted the Health Department to learn
how many refugees tested positive for TB in recent years. The
inquiry sparked private meetings among state epidemiologists, public
health nurses and office staff, who proceeded to conceal the
number of contagious active TB disease cases brought to Vermont through
the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program.
Health department employees and
lawyers included in the communication loop were Health Policy Coordinator Ben
Truman, Refugee Health and Health Equity Coordinator Martha Friedman, public
health specialist Sally Cook, Communications Director Nancy Erickson, and legal
counselors Margaret Vincent and Bessie Weiss.
TB CONTROL: Vermont state
epidemiologist Patsy Kelso sent Watchdog’s request for information to
tuberculosis control leaders who proceeded to withhold the number of active TB
disease cases among resettled refugees.
State epidemiologist Patsy Kelso
sent Watchdog’s May 27 request for data to Laura Ann Nicolai, deputy state
epidemiologist and head of the tuberculosis control program. Nicolai
met with department staff and legal counsel that day and the following
week to concoct a plan to hide the number of refugees with active TB
disease.
“This doesn’t say that he wants to
know how many cases were identified, so I wouldn’t offer it. If he asks it
would be important to explain that latent infection is not reportable,” Nicolai
wrote to the team on May 27.
As team members contemplated an
official response, Nicolai drafted bulleted talking points to explain
the difference between active TB disease and latent TB infection, and
Truman suggested the possibility of making Watchdog file a public
records request to obtain data.
After deliberation, the
team agreed to reveal the number of refugees testing positive
for TB but conceal the number of refugees with contagious active TB
disease.
When the team conferred again on May
31, Nicolai discussed what to do if Watchdog wanted “additional
information on TB disease specifically.”
“If the reporter wants additional
information on TB disease specifically then either Sally or I would be happy to
talk with him. We could discuss the difference between latent and active
infection, etc. or any of the talking points I provided on Friday,”
Nicolai wrote.
She added: “If at any point
along the way he changes what he wants and decides he’d like additional data,
such as the number of active cases among refugees, then we can cross that
bridge when we come to it.”
The draft response, completed an
hour and a half later, included four years of refugee TB blood test results and
bulleted information explaining the difference between latent and active TB.
Excluded from the response was the number of refugees with active TB disease.
When Truman delivered the Health
Department’s June 1 response to Watchdog without the number of active TB
disease cases, Watchdog asked for “actual numbers of refugee active
TB cases per year, starting at FY2011 and ending in FY2016.”
Truman, according to plan,
replied: “To address the scope of the additional information you want, please
submit this as a formal public records request.” With the limited information
provided, Watchdog reported that 318 refugees out of about 900 admitted to
Vermont since 2013 — or 35.4 percent — tested positive for tuberculosis. Regarding active TB cases, the article included the only
statistic offered by the Health Department — a comfortingly low
incidence statistic of 5.4 cases per year over five years. That statistic
includes Vermonters only, not refugees with active TB disease.
When Nicolai conferred with the team
on June 3, she tells Truman: “This is the average for active cases among all
Vermonters. It does not specify that this is the average number of cases among
refugees. Should this be clarified?” Truman replied: “I suggest any
further info be in the context of responses to any PRR [public records request]
he may choose to make. To my knowledge, none has been made at this time.”
CHEN: Even after making Watchdog
file a public records request to learn the number of refugees with active TB
disease, the Health Department, in its June 23 response, withheld the data. The
evasive response was made ‘on behalf of the Commissioner of the Vermont
Department of Health,’ Dr. Harry Chen.
Watchdog filed a public records
request on June 9, asking again for the statistical number of active TB disease
cases among resettled refugees. The Health Department’s response,
delivered June 23 “on behalf of the Commissioner of the Vermont
Department of Health,” did not provide the data.
The response did reveal the team’s
evasion efforts, however, captured in this series of emails.READ: Emails reveal evasion
by Vermont’s state epidemiologists. The responsive records also
revealed that Truman sent the team’s original June 1 response to Watchdog to
John Walters, a self-described liberal blogger writing at the Vermont
Political Observer. Walters subsequently wrote a June 4 blog entry that advanced the Health Department’s talking points
and accused Watchdog of “fearmongering.”
The development comes as Rutland
Mayor Christopher Louras and the city’s Board of Aldermen are weighing whether or not to let residents
vote on accepting 100 Syrian refugees in October. Louras says letting the people of Rutland vote on the
issue is “offensive.”
Watchdog has additional requests
pending at the Department of Health and plans to report the annual number
of active TB disease cases among refugees resettled in Vermont over the past
five years. Contact
Bruce Parker at bparker@watchdog.org
http://watchdog.org/269149/vermont-health-department-concealing-refugees-with-active-tb-disease/
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