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).
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