The Garden City Telegram
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Overcoming the language barrier
Published 9/10/2008 in News : Education
By EMILY BEHLMANN
ebehlmann@gctelegram.com
It's not just Spanish and Vietnamese anymore.
Garden City USD 457 staff have been used to having students enter their schools who don't speak English. Spanish speakers have been part of the community for decades, and many Vietnamese arrived in the 1990s.
Now, however, the community streets and school halls are filled with many more languages. Janie Perkins, supplemental services coordinator for USD 457, said the district has non-English speaking students who communicate in languages including Somali, Arabic, Chinese, Burmese and Karen, a dialect spoken by a Burmese ethnic group.
Many are children from Burmese and Somali refugee families that have arrived in the Garden City area in recent months so their parents can work at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Holcomb.
"We're less prepared than we were with Spanish and Vietnamese, so it will take a little time," Perkins said. "But because we have such a diverse community and student population, we feel very comfortable."
She said the district is trying to expand its resources for getting across basic information to its non-English speakers, until they can pick up enough English to understand. USD 457 also is relying on translators from Garden City Community College and from the community in general on the occasions it needs to communicate with families, she said.
The youngest incoming students go to the elementary schools closest to their homes, and Perkins said many staff members there have English as a Second Language endorsements, which means they've taken classes that provide strategies for communicating with non-English speakers, regardless of the languages students speak.
Those older than the elementary level start out their American school careers working with Sylvia Orosco, teacher at the Newcomer Center, which is housed in the same building as USD 457's New Outlook Academy alternative high school.
Orosco said her classroom resources have included Spanish/English and Vietnamese/English electronic translators, which students and staff can use to translate words from one language to another, both visually and audibly. The district also purchased an English/Chinese translator for a boy who now attends Charles O. Stone Intermediate Center.
Now, however, the district is expanding its stock of talking translators, with two that can talk in 40 languages, including Burmese, Karen and Somali, Perkins said. Cornerstone Church is helping provide funding to buy more of the $269 machines, Perkins said.
Orosco said the devices help with lessons like the one she was conducting Tuesday morning, in which her class pronounced new English words, wrote out the words and looked up the translations.
"Not knowing a word of English --new vocabulary words are thrown to them, and they don't know," she said.
However, the machines can't help every student, she said. One Burmese boy who lived in a Thai refugee camp is illiterate, so a written Burmese translation of a word means little to him, a fellow Burmese student explained to Orosco.
"They help each other," she said of her students.
They also turn to other materials, like colorful posters and workbooks that show pictures of everyday school objects and label them in English.
Orosco said that when students first arrive, the messages she needs to communicate are those of surviving school -- getting immunizations, securing school supplies and finding the school bus. That takes a team of translators called in from various places, plus "field trips," where staff show their new students how to do things like get from home to the bus stop, she said.
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