In the Santa Maria-Bonita School District (SMBSD), the number of students who speak a language other than English at home outweighs the English-speaking students, according to data presented at a March 24 special board meeting.
Nearly 10,500 students speak Spanish at home, more than 1,700 speak Mixteco, and nearly 500 speak other languages. The district has a little more than 3,000 students who speak English at home.
Santa Maria-Bonita provides interpretation services to its students and their guardians whose primary languages are English, Spanish, and Mixteco.
Providing interpretation and translation services for these students and their families is what’s required of a school district, SMBSD Public Information Officer Maggie White said.
“And then there’s common sense and how you want the families of your students to feel at your schools, how you value their feedback, regardless of how it’s provided, and how you want to make them comfortable and connected because of all of those things,” she said.
White said the district’s interpretation services are “simpler” than most school districts in the state, which often provide services in Vietnamese, Hindi, Hmong, or Farsi. School districts, she said, often have to provide interpretation for more than just conversational situations. The interpreter also needs to understand educational terminology—chemistry terms, for example.
Because Mixteco doesn’t have a written component for its language, Santa Maria-Bonita created videos in which Mixteco speakers talk about certain notices that would have otherwise been mailed or sent home with a student.
“We can’t tell if we’re meeting all of those needs, either academic or even socio-emotional, without hearing from the families. Families are such an important stronghold for our students,” she said.
Santa Maria-Bonita is fortunate, White said, to have many community members and board members who are bilingual or trilingual (English, Spanish, and Mixteco) and can communicate with the district’s families.
Not all school districts are as fortunate. Paso Robles community activist Yessenia Echevarria, who founded Paso People’s Action and Mujeres de Acción (Women of Action), works to inform and educate Latino-speaking residents in the community. A lot of her recent work has focused on getting the news out about a high school ethnic studies course proposed for the Paso Robles Unified School District.
That work included rallying Latino and Spanish speakers to participate in school board meetings by speaking about their experiences during public comment in a language that they’re comfortable with. But at Paso Robles school district meetings, Spanish-speakers are sometimes discouraged from making public comments in Spanish.
During public comment at the March and April Paso Robles Joint Unified School District board meetings about the ethnic studies course proposal, board member Chris Arend interrupted several public commenters who spoke in Spanish.
“The rule is when you address the board, since you’re fluent in English, you do not need help, you can address the board in English, and it will be simultaneously translated. You do not address the board in Spanish, which none of us understand,” Arend said right before a public commenter made their statement at the March 23 board meeting.
California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) found that 35 percent of all students enrolled in the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District come from homes where Spanish is the primary language. Although the district does provide translation services at its board meetings, the interpretation from English to Spanish and Spanish to English isn’t always clear.
At the April 13 school board meeting, San Luis Obispo Democratic Party Chair Rita Casaverde said she wanted to make her comment in Spanish.
“I speak more than two languages, and I’m multicultural. Today, I speak in Spanish, not because I want to make you feel uncomfortable. I speak in Spanish because I can. It’s the language that I want to speak in today,” Casaverde said in Spanish.
The interpreter asked Casaverde to repeat those sentences three times and couldn’t translate Casaverde’s comments into English for the board.
“This is not working with the translation. And I hate to say it, my old traditional rule is if you can speak to us in English, speak to us in English. We are glad to provide translation services for people who need them, but not for people that speak English and can communicate with us perfectly. Frankly, I’m getting tired of us horsing around with this every week,” Arend said.
Casaverde was ultimately allowed to make her comments in both Spanish and English.
“The precedent that this board is setting is horrible,” she said. “I would also like this board to hire services of translation that can actually help people get their message across. … Just right now we have proof that this board is not ready to provide translation services.”
School districts throughout California are required to provide a means of communication for parents whose first language isn’t English. However, there aren’t strict guidelines for how to provide those resources.
Paso People’s Action and Mujeres de Acción recently hosted a virtual “Know Your Rights” learning forum with CRLA—in English and Spanish—to help the community understand how school districts could meet their needs. During the forum, CRLA Director of Litigation Cynthia Rice said that school districts don’t have a bright-line to follow in terms of providing interpretation services.
“Essentially, school boards and public agencies of all types who hold public hearings have the authority to implement procedures to facilitate the efficient running of a meeting. I do think, however, we have been successful in arguing that when those procedures limit a speaker to three minutes when there is not a simultaneous interpretation, that is not provided to that board or agency, and that would be a violation,” Rice said.
In other words, when translation is needed to interpret a speaker’s comments, more time should be allotted to the speaker so the interpreter can translate the speaker’s comments.
Deborah Escobedo, a senior attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco, said she believes the California Department of Education has a very loose standard with respect to translators. Escobedo said translators and interpreters hired by districts don’t need to be certified. Although training is required, there isn’t a training standard.
School districts create their own interpreter policies to meet the needs of the communities they serve. For instance, Coast Unified School District, which serves students in Cambria and Cayucos, asks that requests for interpreters be made three days in advance of a school board meeting.
Coast Unified’s administrative assistant to the superintendent, Bonnie Duston, said a non-English speaker may bring their own interpreter to the meeting, and the interpreter (personal or district-provided) is given extra time to translate.
“Most parents bring their own interpreter, but we have several district employees assigned to provide translation if requested for a board meeting. In addition, each of our school sites have a bilingual clerk [Spanish] that is available for translation services during school hours,” Duston said.
For the Santa Maria-Bonita School District, providing translation and interpretation services is “all about creating that sense of community, and it’s all for supporting students,” Public Information Officer White said.
“That’s what we’re here for, if a school district is not here to help students be the best they can be and provide them with as many opportunities as possible, then what are we doing here?” she said. “And that includes embracing whatever might be unusual or different about their families.”
Staff Writer Karen Garcia can be reached at kgarcia@newtimesslo.com. Staff Writer Malea Martin can be reached at mmartin@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 6, 2021.