With so many schools and districts more than deserving of one of K12Translate’s Translation Grants, narrowing the choices down to three was quite a feat! We are truly thankful for all that applied to the program and wish we could have extended an award to each of you. It is with much excitement now that we announce the three winners of our first annual Translation Grant Program: Denver’s Place Bridge Academy, Washington state’s Central Valley School District and Illinois’ Rock Island School District #41. Here’s a brief snapshot of the three recipients:
With students hailing from 30 different countries and speaking 40+ languages, K12Translate is excited to support the grand prize winner, Place Bridge Academy, and their efforts to bridge the communication gap and strengthen ties with their ELL families.
Central Valley School District (CVSD) comprises of 12,400 students speaking over 21 languages. CVSD will use their grant to reach their ELL students and families by translating much-needed documents related to their special-education services and other core materials.
And finally, faced with a rapidly growing refugee population and limited resources, Rock Island School District will use their translation grant for expanding their communication efforts with each of their diverse communities.
Stay tuned to learn how the three winners will use their translation grants, and what kind of impact it will have on their students and communities—we look forward to passing on the good news!
Keep Learning!
Leslie
K12Translate
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Posts Tagged ‘English Language Learners’
K12Translate Awards Three Schools/Districts through their Inaugural Translation Grant Program
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010Perhaps PPS Can Be a Lesson to All School Districts
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
I came across an interesting story right from K12Translate’s home state (and city!) of Portland, Oregon. As reported by KATU News, a local Latina activist by the name of Marta Guembes went undercover to investigate Portland Public Schools’ progress in communicating with non-English speaking parents.
Just last year, PPS was required by the state Department of Education to improve communication with non-English speaking parents in order to meet state and federal laws. With 10 percent of the PPS parent population not speaking English, and over 72 languages represented, Guembes set out to see if the district was making strides towards better communication with these populations.
Guembes, undercover as a Spanish-speaking immigrant, called 85 Portland schools over two days. As you can read in her report, the results were not favorable as over one-third of the schools called provided no assistance or information to her, simply responding with “no español.” The remaining schools, according to Guembes, did “not meet the protocol” either.
Now we at K12Translate are big fans of school districts in any state, and we truly understand and appreciate the many barriers there are to providing language access to increasingly diverse student and parent populations. With budgets drastically shrinking, and classrooms rapidly growing, achieving this is challenging at best. But with a bit of planning and the right translation tools and teams, not being another lesson like PPS is possible, and very worth it.
Keep Learning!
Leslie
K12Translate
A Boost to Help Build the Home-School Connection
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
We at K12Translate believe that bridging the language gap is key to improving and increasing parental involvement of your ESL/ELL students. To further this cause and support schools or districts pursuing similar initiatives, we are excited to announce our first annual K12 Translation Grant Program! This unique, in-kind donation program will award a total of $2000 in translations to schools or districts meeting the eligibility requirements. The deadline is June 15th, 2010 so visit the K12 Translation Grant Program page now to apply!
Best of luck, and keep learning!
Leslie
K12Translate
Improving Educational Outcomes for English Language Learners
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
With many states facing dramatic increases in their ELL populations, The Working Group on ELL Policy, a team of leading ELL researchers and policy experts, has published a report on how to best keep pace with the growing needs of English Language Learners. Focused on improving educational outcomes for ELLs, the report is aimed to inform lawmakers who are discussing reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind.
The report offers recommendations to improve five key areas of ESEA, making the new policy much more comprehensive than it is today. The proposed changes not only emphasize access to high-quality teachers for ELLs, but also suggest backing schools’ efforts to teach bilingual education. The report recommends that the amount of time it takes ELLs to learn English should be taken into account, therefore allowing the students to have adequate time and resources to develop proficiency and academic progress. It is also suggested that states should employ consistent identification and classification of their ELL students, as well as the length and type of services for them.
With increasingly diverse student populations growing faster than ever, it may be time to revisit our policies to ensure the best strategies and educational opportunities are available for our English Language Learners.
Keep Learning!
Leslie
K12Translate
Develop Strategies for Avoiding Translation Traps
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
Among the myriad challenges facing the nation’s school districts is the mounting costs of their multilingual communications. Yet with over 20% of the U.S. population speaking a language other than English, ensuring that your school’s information be made available in a language your students and parents understand is critical. The high amount of information, forms and permissions that schools distribute often present a challenge to these non-native English speakers. And unfamiliarity with the American K-12 system can equally impact the ability of LEP/ELL parents to fully participate in their child’s education.
So how can schools ensure effective communications that truly reach their growing LEP populations? What can be done to keep translation quality high while staying within budget? As part of our free webinar series at K12Translate, we are offering an installment that directly addresses these issues. Titled “Avoiding Eight Translation Traps: Planning Multilingual Communication for Your District,” the webinar will take place 11:30 a.m. (PT) on April 6th and will explore a range of strategies for responding to today’s changing K12 environment.
We hope you can join us for this webinar!
Click here to register
Keep Learning!
Leslie
K12Translate
The State of English Language Learners
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
I just finished reading a rather concerning Los Angeles Times article about English Language Learners in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The article discusses a study that was released on Wednesday which suggests that 30% of ELL students in LAUSD remain in English languages classes far too long – from primary grades into high school.
What the study doesn’t address is why these students remain in English Language Learning classrooms for so long. Is there an egregious lack of ELL education funding? Have culturally appropriate education translations been made available? What socio-political factors play a role in this learning gap? The article even mentions; “researchers say schools may avoid moving English learners into mainstream classes to keep test scores high.”
With such a variety of variables affecting how and when our ELL students are entering into mainstream classrooms, we need to get very serious about how we address English Language Learning. Considering 20% of elementary and secondary school children speak a language other than English at home it is absolutely crucial for our non-native English speaking students to become more competitive in school.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
Is the Supreme Court determining the fate of education translation services in schools?
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
There has been a lot in the news concerning the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 Horne v. Flores ruling that says the federal government should no longer be supervising state spending on ELL education in Arizona. The highest court in the land has found that Arizona already does a sufficient job of educating ELL students, and Arizona has not broken any federal laws that require schools to provide assistance such as education translation services and bilingual programs to ELL students.
According to Richard Fry of the Pew Research Center, the five states with the highest number of ELL students are Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas with about 70% of the total country’s ELL student population. Of this student population, there is still a very significant achievement gap between ELL students and their fluent English speaking counterparts, “In both elementary grades and middle school grades in these states, ELL students are much less likely than white students to score at or above the proficient level in mathematics. The measured gaps are in the double-digits. For example, in Florida 45% of ELL third-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the math assessment, compared with 78% of white third-graders, yielding a white-to-ELL gap of 34 percentage points.”
In my mind, with a 34% achievement gap, I am incredibly hesitant to discontinue monitoring state spending on ELL education. It is our responsibility to ensure all students, regardless of their English fluency, are receiving the highest quality education that we can provide. If we don’t spend the money necessary for education translation services and ELL programs, our ELL students will slip through the cracks even further.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
References:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/education/26educ.html?_r=3&emc=eta1
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/882/english-language-learner
New People, New Languages – Rare Languages Spoken in the United States
Monday, June 8th, 2009
As many teachers and administrators already know, requests for Languages of Limited Diffusion are on the rise among providers of K12 education language translation services. According to the UNESCO , in the world today, the number of people speaking lesser-known languages is 1.25 billion, or 20 percent of the world’s population.
Over the past five years, I have seen language requests expand outside the core languages of Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese and Chinese into languages rarely seen before in the United States such as Twi (Ghana), Karen (Myanmar/Burma) and Ilocano (Philipines).
On one hand, it is of vital importance for educators to be at the forefront of this movement in order to communicate effectively with English Language Learning (ELL) communities. On the other hand, rare languages pose significant challenges for providers of language translation services. These include limited translator availability, cost-prohibitive translations and low literacy rates within the target audience.
I will be spending the next several posts discussing new populations coming to the United States and different strategies to overcome some of the language translation challenges school districts face.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
Michelle Obama highlights the necessity of K12 ELL education and effective language translation services
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Michelle Obama’s recent commencement speech at the University of California – Merced is remarkable in many ways. But the most striking element is that instead of speaking at a well-established school such as Harvard or Stanford, Ms. Obama chose UC-Merced, a little-known, four-year-old university with a diverse student population made up of 40.3 percent underrepresented ethnic or racial groups. Many of these students are immigrants or come from English Language Learning (ELL) immigrant families.
Ms. Obama’s choice highlights a growing education trend in the United States. This emerging movement recognizes and provides high-quality education to a widely diverse population who speaks many languages and maintains distinctive cultures. This makes sense when you consider that between 1990 and 2000, non-white ethnic populations jumped from 23 percent to 30 percent and are commonly expected to account for over half the U.S. population by 2050.
During the early K12 years, ELL students and parents thrive in culturally sensitive environments that provide language translation services and embrace differences. These same students enroll in schools like the University of California – Merced, schools that celebrate our nation’s diversity.
Just ask the First Lady where our youth is headed.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
