At Mall, Multilingual Outreach
Kiosk Adds to Ways Schools Offer Aid to Foreign-Born Parents

By William Wan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 24, 2008

Like the operators of any other kiosk in Westfield Shoppingtown Wheaton, the Montgomery County educators had picked their location judiciously, settling on a prime spot between the food court and J.C. Penney.

But instead of cellphone trinkets and watches, their stand at the mall yesterday offered a multilingual assortment of pamphlets addressing everything from how to help your child with math homework to how to sign up for news alert e-mails in Spanish or French.

This is the face of today's parent outreach. School systems trying to adapt to increasingly diverse student populations are starting GED classes in Spanish for parents, holding workshops to explain concepts such as physical education and PTAs, and translating their handouts into an assortment of tongues including Vietnamese and Urdu.

But making a connection can be tough. Besides the language barrier, there are cultural hurdles. Schools here can often seem bizarre and intimidating to foreign-born parents, prompting systems such as Montgomery's to look for better ways to get face time with parents. So, yesterday, the educators hit the shopping center.

"The mall makes perfect sense," said Eric Davis, who heads the Montgomery schools' Division of Family and Community Partnerships. "A lot of these parents often work two to three jobs and can't go to meetings. It doesn't mean they don't care or don't want to be involved. We have to figure out ways to give them the tools to help their children."

Some of the tools at the booth were booklets explaining the vast and sometimes confusing school system bureaucracy in six languages, fliers for multilingual parenting workshops and instructions on how to enroll international students.

Naimbaye Dasnan, a father who recently came to the United States from Chad in Central Africa, wandered by after seeing the crowd of friendly school staffers and their blue "Ask MCPS" buttons.

One of them asked him if he had children. When he said yes, several of the staffers pounced on the opportunity.

Five of his six children, the staffers learned, will enroll in public schools in the spring after they arrive from Africa. Molly Hong, a staffer in the communications department, handed Dasnan several pamphlets in French, his native language, and jotted down a list of documents his children would need to enroll.

"I was surprised to find this here in the middle of the mall," Dasnan said after a thorough briefing by several school employees. "But it's good to know about all this. My children speak French, not English. I worry for them making friends and adjusting."

Although an international component has long existed in many school systems in the Washington region, such efforts have increased in the past decade as the population has grown more diverse.

From Prince William County to Prince George's County, school systems are holding English classes for parents. Some schools in Arlington County offer instantaneous Spanish translation through headphones at PTA meetings. And many school systems have full-time workers whose sole job is to conduct multilingual parenting workshops and visit homes to establish relationships with immigrant parents and help them participate in the education process.

In Montgomery, more than half of the staff in the Division of Family and Community Partnerships is bilingual, and in the past eight years, the county has made a strong push to translate all materials -- from its Web site to its webcasts -- into multiple languages.

In dozens of studies, experts say, parents' involvement has been shown to be a key to increasing student achievement in schools. The approach and level of outreach varies widely from county to county, according to their local immigrant populations, said Young-Chan Han, who works on such family involvement issues for the Maryland State Department of Education's Division of Student, Family and School Support.

"Often it starts out with the immediate needs, like providing interpreting for parents at a local school, and grows into more proactive programs that address the systematic need to help parents be advocates for their children," she said.

In Howard County, where Han worked for eight years before moving to the state education department, school officials have begun a workshop called the International Leadership Program to equip bilingual parents with the tools to be advocates for parents who can't speak English. And Howard now has a pool of such leaders serving in PTAs and on policy review committees.

"The advocacy part of it is important," Han said, "because unless you hear from a diverse group of parents, you don't know what programs you need to reach the children."