Workshop News
PIVE held its first workshop, entitled Enfrentando las Barreras del Lenguaje (Confronting Language Barriers), in June for the Jackson Heights community. The workshop covered the right to translation and interpretation services, as well as the types of ELL programs available in NYC.
We are currently working to develop our Parent Leadership curriculum which will be used to give workshops at different community groups.
NICE, our sponsor and ally has requested TWO workshops for its ESL students on issues for immigrant parents and education. The workshops will be held on June 19 and 24 at 10 am at the NICE office. On the 19th, we will repeat the aforementioned workshop on language barriers. On the 24th, we will be running a workshop on the importance of parent teacher conferences as a way to stay involved and aware. We are currently working to integrate English lessons within these workshops!
We are also currently gathering information on nonprofit organizations throughout NYC who might be interested in allowing us to do on-site workshops for their members or ESL students. If you have any suggestions, please e-mail us at nypive@gmail.com.
Website News
We are currently exploring options for the launch of a PIVE website. As we develop more educational materials and fact sheets, we feel that it is important to share these materials with the community. If you are interested in helping us, or have any info on how to do this in an affordable way, please let us know.
Volunteer News
A few weeks ago, we received a number of emails from our post on Idealist.org, where we asked for "virtual" translation volunteers. We now have potential volunteer translators for the following languages: Spanish, Arabic, Bengali and Urdu. Translation and interpretation services are also available for speakers of Chinese, Korean, Russian and Haitian Creole. We are always looking for volunteer translators/interpreters. Contact us for more info!
Thank you to all of our wonderful and dedicated volunteers!
Education News
It appears that PIVE's mission to promote translation and interpretation services to parents is truly addressing a crucial need in NYC. At the time of our founding, we referred to a study by the New York Immigration Coalition (which you can find in our related links section), that reported that parents and school officials were unaware of these services.
The NYIC has released the findings of an updated study, which finds that parents are still largely in the dark about these services and many are not seeing the results of this language access policy. Among the findings:
- 60% of surveyed parents reported being unaware of their rights to translation and interpretation.
- Two-thirds of respondents did not receive report cards or notices about Parent Teacher Conferences in their native language.
While we would have hoped for a major improvement in these statistics, we now feel even more motivated to continue on our mission to organize and educate parents on these issues.
Thank you!
As always, we want to thank you for your continued support and encourage you to share with us any comments, questions or suggestions in work we could be doing to help immigrant parents become a more meaningful part of their children's education!
