A cart is used to hold and organize school-owned laptops to be distributed to students at a Manhattan elementary school in March. | Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
As the new school year approaches, immigrant families and advocates for English language learners are asking New York City's Department of Education to expand outreach as the agency considers plans for transitioning to blended learning models if schools reopen.
They say they want better communication from the department and are concerned about families not having the digital literacy needed to navigate remote learning.
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The DOE has not released data on how remote learning went in the spring for those families as well as other vulnerable groups; advocates say the data is necessary to shape reopening plans. They also said many families are not aware of an Aug. 7 deadline for families to choose full-time remote learning and have not been given the opportunity to provide proper input.
While these students and families faced significant challenges before the pandemic, advocates and families said the shift to remote learning has made schooling harder given that parents often do not know how to navigate the platforms and have limited English-speaking abilities. Students learning English also struggle without in-person services.
Vanessa Luna, co-founder and chief program officer for ImmSchools — an immigrant-led nonprofit organization that supports undocumented and mixed-status families — said families are worried about accessing basic aid and teaching their children.
“Based on the conversations that I’ve had with parents and with family members, many of them are feeling as though this plan has just been thrust upon them,” she said.
She suggested the DOE partner with other institutions and organizations to address child care needs, and said information her organization has translated for families often isn’t digestible — even in their home languages.
So far, most families her organization serves prefer the hybrid approach, which allows students to be in school part-time if there is a way to keep them safe, especially for elementary and middle school children, and online learning for high schoolers if there are health factors among family members.
The DOE said each school is submitting a Language Translation and Interpretation Plan for families and has received a Family Engagement Toolkit with content centered on return-to-school for the fall. The department also said summer professional learning for principals included a unit that focuses on engaging families and strategies.
The DOE also pointed to its partnerships with the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs to distribute multilingual Covid-19 immigrant resource guides at meal hubs and its expansion of its Tech Ambassadors program.
“Our family-facing letters and website reopening updates have been translated in nine languages, and we created remote learning guides based on direct input from community organizations and families," DOE spokesperson Danielle Filson said in a statement. "We recognize there is more we can do, and we are currently developing a targeted outreach and partnership plan for the fall so that every family is fully informed.”
The New York Immigration Coalition Education Collaborative — which includes Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, Masa, and Advocates for Children of New York — sent a letter to schools chancellor Richard Carranza on July 24 recommending that the DOE establish a communications plan for the summer and into the 2020-21 school year.
Their recommendations for school-based communications include prioritizing hard-to-reach immigrant households and those with limited English proficiency, and parents with low literacy in any language and low digital literacy.
They recommend that schools communicate with parents through “continuous touchpoints” like phone calls, text messages, social media and emails. They also said schools should use videos and pictures and infographics, and pointed to social media sources like Twitter, Facebook Live, WeChat and Instagram.
The group also recommended that DOE's headquarters include videos, graphics and prepackaged messaging for schools to use, and that administrators encourage schools to focus school-based translation and interpretation funds for direct outreach to those families.
They also want DOE to follow an executive order mandating that the department spend at least half of its annual print and digital advertising budgets on community and ethnic media outlets, and share materials with large immigrant employers, religious institutions and community-based organizations.
Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, director of the Immigrant Students' Rights Project for the Advocates for Children of New York, said the DOE’s Division of Community Affairs has engaged groups via weekly calls but noted DOE documents were not translated in the top nine languages used in schools at the beginning of the crisis.
"I think what we're looking for from the DOE is an acknowledgment and a recognition that many families have been left behind and that a lot needs to be done in order to be able to fix the errors that they have committed, especially over the last several months,” Rodriguez-Engberg said in an interview. “I think we can't move forward with remote instruction and issuing new policies every several weeks that really impact families without ensuring that families are actually becoming aware of them."
Kim Sykes, NYIC’s director of education policy, said the DOE relied heavily on online communications.
“These families often struggled to understand how to interact with online platforms, how to get devices or technological supports, how to get services for their children with special needs, or find food, child care, and basic services,” Sykes said.
Teresa, a Mexican immigrant who asked that her last name not be used, lives in the Bronx with her partner and an 8-year-old daughter who attends an elementary school in Manhattan and a 3-year-old daughter, who is in prekindergarten. Because a city-provided tablet didn’t arrive on time, she had to pay nearly $600 for her own device plus Wi-Fi installation and service — a steep cost given that she was out of work due to the pandemic. She received financial support from ImmSchools.
Despite the fact that her older daughter’s teacher speaks Spanish, she said the experience has still been “very difficult” as she speaks very little English, she said, adding that it would take her more than two hours to figure out how to navigate the applications.
She is open to full-time remote learning but cautioned that her older daughter needs live instruction — which she didn’t get much of during the pandemic — so she can continue to learn the language. She said a video for parents that explains how to use the applications would be helpful.
Families who speak languages not included in DOE translations and parents who cannot read or write need additional assistance, said Soukaina Touré, a parent leader in District 9 in the Bronx, adding that even for DOE languages, documents are translated but not students’ work. Touré has helped African families, including making videos of herself explaining how to use platforms and translating documents in languages like French, Bambara and Wolof.
“They need to hire people to help translate these assignments and lessons,” Touré said.
She added that families want to send their kids back to school because they can’t handle teaching them or afford a babysitter but also have safety concerns.
Families that Touré has assisted throughout the pandemic urged the DOE to consider hiring individuals who speak their languages.
Mali native Niouma Diagouraga, 18, who recently graduated from South Bronx Preparatory, is headed to the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the fall.
She has had to juggle ensuring her 5-year-old brother and 6-year-old sister, who attend Sheridan Academy, keep up with their work while completing her own assignments. Her mother, a home day care provider, speaks Soninke and Bambara but her English and French are limited.
Her mother has accepted the hybrid option for the fall for now. Sheridan Academy has many African students, she said, primarily from Gambia but also some from Guinea and Ghana. Most speak Soninke and Bambara, and a very small number speak English and French.
“For my mom, she's home,” she said, suggesting in-person sessions or individual or group calls with families. “They could communicate with her.”
Manty Kaba, a 59-year-old Guinean immigrant and Bronx resident, sent her 5-year-old grandson, also at Sheridan Academy, to her brother’s place in Brooklyn as he has older children who could help him. She speaks French and Malinke. While she speaks a bit of English, she’s not fluent. She said she could handle part-time remote learning by herself if she receives translations.
“I want [the city] to help us so our students can study,” she said through a French translation. “If the mayor feels sorry for us women here, he should help us … the immigrants who speak other languages.”
Cristal, who lives with her 8-year-old son and her husband in Brooklyn, had trouble accessing links, among other issues, and works long hours in a factory packaging cleaning supplies. She said her son, who attends P. S. 1 and has a disability, has lost about two years of progress.
"I feel worried that my child is not going to receive the services that he requires,” she said through a Spanish translation. She, too, asked to be referred to by her first name only.
Mohammad Ali, treasurer for the Queens-based Bangladesh Society, said his organization has helped Bangladeshi families with remote learning. There are mixed views on returning to school versus virtual learning in the fall, he said.
"We want actually Bangladeshi people [who] have language barriers to have a little more learning classes,” Ali said. “If people have more, [the] Education Department can [have more] access to the family members, especially parents.”
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