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Members of the Spanish-speaking community are calling on the Riverhead Board of Education to increase language accessibility during school board meetings and other interactions.
The request came primarily from members of the Alliance, the Center for Solidarity and Accompanying Migrants (CASA) Education Committee and the Ministry of Rural Affairs and Migration, who raised the concern at the Jan. 23 school board meeting.
“I understand the importance of parents being involved in their children’s schools,” Emilse Hernandez, a parent whose child will attend kindergarten in the district, told the board through an interpreter. “But we can only be part of this if there is better communication between parents and teachers.”
At that night’s meeting, Interim District Clerk Rodney Parrish announced in English that Spanish translation services were available. The meeting will be translated live via a headset in the back of the high school auditorium where the board meeting is held.
This is the first time the district has notified the community about such services in recent years. Former school board candidate Kimberly Wilder made the announcement at the Jan. 10 board meeting, saying it was necessary to include Spanish-speaking parents in the meeting.
According to state Department of Education statistics, 63% of the district’s students are Hispanic or Latino. The data shows that English learners make up 37% of the district’s enrolled students, but the data does not identify students’ primary language.
At a public hearing on the Riverhead Charter School expansion proposal on October 12, 2021, translation services were notably absent. Many parents in the large crowd that night spoke Spanish. Laurie Downs, the school board president at the time, said translation services were not available that night and a parent in the audience loudly asked the board if the meeting could be translated. The charter school board treasurer who attended the public hearing ended up acting as an interpreter for a Spanish-speaking parent who addressed the school board at the hearing.
Downs, who served on the school board from 2016 until last spring, said in an interview this week that during her tenure the school board had an employee who provided translation services for Spanish-speaking parents. But she said that may have stopped during the coronavirus pandemic, when everything went virtual and never seemed to come back.
Downs said the district purchased the headset devices and pushed to have interpreters at meetings during the tenure of former Superintendent Aurelia Henriquez, who held the top job from 2017 to 2020.
Current district officials said recent school board meetings had an interpreter present, but acknowledged the service had not been announced in the meeting notice or the meeting itself.
“The biggest problem is not informing the public about available translation services,” said Colin Palmer, chairman of the Board of Education.
Palmer, who presides over board meetings as president, said he didn’t know a translator was present until interim Superintendent Cheryl Pedicich told him.
Pedicich said in an interview that several district staff told her that translation services have been available since the beginning of the school year. Pedicich, who joined the district as interim superintendent in October, would not disclose the information to a reporter who provided it to her.
Pedicich said the interpreter at the school board meeting was a bilingual district employee.
Palmer said the board will announce translation services at board meetings. Once a new permanent district clerk is available, this availability will be added to the meeting notice. If the school board starts receiving requests for documents in different languages, he said, the board will make those documents available to the public.
The district releases most virtual letters to the community, all quarterly communications, and notices of district elections and budget votes in English and Spanish.
“It’s not something we don’t take into consideration. We continue to work on it every day,” Palmer said.
Noemi Sanchez, coordinator of the Department of Rural and Resettlement, told the board at its last meeting that there are also issues with translation services outside of school board meetings. She said she had to help a Spanish-speaking parent and when she was asked to speak to school officials, there was no interpreter.
“There are a lot of students in this district who only speak Spanish and they need translation and interpretation all the time, not just sometimes,” Sanchez said.
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