What School Translation Services Look Like in New York City
Education

What School Translation Services Look Like in New York City

By Mary Ann Zehr — August 14, 2007 1 min read
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While the federal government requires school districts to communicate with immigrant parents “to the extent practicable” in languages they can understand, doing so is seldom a simple matter. An article that ran Aug. 13 in The New York Times provides insight into the challenges of translating school documents into many different languages.

I wrote about the New York City Education Department’s decision to set up a centralized office for translation and about efforts by other school districts to communicate with parents who don’t speak English in October 2004.

Readers, I’d like to hear how your school districts are trying to meet the challenge of communicating with parents who don’t know much English.

Mary Ann Zehr
Mary Ann Zehr was an assistant editor for Education Week. Her beats included English-language learners, bilingual education, immigrants, dropouts, achievement-gap issues, and charter and private schools. She is the author of the blog Learning the Language.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.