LYNN — Lynn Public Schools has received a significant boost in funding to help staff communicate better and more equitably with families that speak Spanish.
The district was awarded $35,000 by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), through its Interpreter in the Education Setting Training grant program.
The grant is meant to support districts in developing their capacity to provide high-quality interpretation services by training bilingual individuals in their school system to become interpreters in the education setting.
“Being bilingual is wonderful, but a very different thing than having the skillset to interpret, especially more complex communications and meetings,” said Charlie Gallo, the district’s compliance officer. “This funding will support multi-tiered initiatives to improve communication accessibility for students and families who speak a language other than English. It will also support the training of bilingual staff to become certified educational interpreter trainers in Massachusetts, allowing staff both in the district and statewide to learn how to better foster a more inclusive learning environment for all students.”
“DESE is pushing for educational interpreting to have its own standards,” said Guillermo Cinelli, the district’s manager of translations and interpreting. “There’s a lot more to interpreting than just knowing the language, and some of that includes maintaining confidentiality and advocating when necessary.”
Lynn Public Schools was one of a handful of districts in the state to participate in a pilot program last year to recommend guidelines for providing trained interpreters in schools. The guidelines include three tiers for services. Language ambassadors in tier 1 would be responsible for understanding the role of an interpreter and the importance of ethics and cultural competency. Trained interpreters in tiers 2 and 3 would have more advanced skills. In tier two, professionals would be responsible for interpreting in settings without legal context, such as parent conferences or other meetings. Cinelli says that is something that parent and family coordinators could be responsible for, as they are often the first point of contact with families. Tier 3 would include more professional experience to interpret during specialized meetings, including Individual Education Plan (IEP) meetings. Qualified interpreters in this tier would successfully pass training coursework and accumulate 50 hours of practice in meetings.
Seven staff members in the district are completing a nine-week, tier 2 training course this fall through the National Association of Educational Translators and Interpreters of Spoken Languages (NAETISL). At least another seven will participate in the winter session of the course. A handful of participants will take part in a more advanced “training the trainer” course this spring, designed to help those individuals provide training to Lynn Public Schools staff, as well as others within the state.
Data from the 2022-23 school year indicates that 25 percent of Massachusetts students speak a language other than English as their first language. Among Lynn students, Cinelli says the primary language spoken at home is not English, but Spanish. That is why the district is focusing on Spanish interpretation services.
“It’s a huge benefit to the families, at least in Lynn, because language barrier is a very real thing,” Cinelli said. “Giving staff the tools to become cultural and language brokers will be so beneficial.”
