The Language Access Lectern | a Piedmont Global Podcast | Episode 4
As English learner (EL) student populations continue to grow, language access remains an urgent need in K-12 classrooms. In conversation with Mireya Pérez, the interpreting services coordinator for Arlington Public Schools and founder of the Brand the Interpreter podcast, Language Access Consultant Mark Byrne unpacks how schools can improve coordination to help EL students catch up to their peers.
You can listen to the full episode here. Keep reading for a recap of Mark and Mireya’s insightful conversation, which was originally broadcast on Brand the Interpreter.
Finding Your “Why” as a Language Access Advocate
Mark: I grew up in a relatively low-income family and struggled a bit when growing up. We didn’t have a lot of opportunities to travel. When I had the opportunity to put myself through college, as part of the mission at Holy Cross, I did a cultural immersion program and found myself in Peru. It made me appreciate the sacrifices that my family made for me. After the immersion program, my language skills were sharper. Mostly, I returned with a sense of gratitude, appreciation, and respect for people and cultures.
Mireya: How did these experiences get you started with language access?
Mark: Nothing really makes me feel as good as I do about positioning language services in a K-12 setting. Language companies across the United States—and globally—don’t focus on K-12 schools as much as they should. Schools get left behind in terms of developing solutions. It’s a great opportunity to advocate for families, multilingual students, school staff, and the interpreters that we work with.
Mireya: When individuals hear language access, they may think about public education and interpreters. We know there is a lot more involved, so I’d like to hear what you are observing, the gaps you’re noticing, and your experiences with language access in schools right now.
Mark: When we talk about language access in schools, it’s about not only expanding the service itself but expanding the knowledge behind the work. As somebody who struggled with their own education, who sat through disciplinary and special education hearings and outplacements, when it became clear you’re not going to be able to make it through the school year, I remember sitting through those meetings not processing what was happening. I’ve sat in that seat and know what it feels like. But I’m also very fortunate in not having a language gap. I had to take remedial math classes, and still went on to earn my four-year diploma and a Master’s degree after that.
When you start thinking about the experience that multilingual families have in the special education realm, engagement is so important. My family was there at all those meetings advocating on my behalf. They got me through to the next level. When there is a language gap, it can be difficult for families to advocate for their students. It’s difficult for the school staff to understand what’s happening at home. At the end of the day, we want to help as educators.
Mireya: What else brought you to this field?
Mark: Another thing that shaped my foundation, understanding of the K-12 space, and how I view language access stems from my experience working with student data at a research and analytics firm. It gave me unique insight into how school leaders think about education and the achievement gaps across different student groups. When you look at multilingual families, you see that very few of them are achieving the student growth rates that their peers are. If we don’t grow those multilingual learners at an accelerated rate, those achievement gaps will continue to exist for years and years.
The business of schools is academic return on investment. It’s not about dollars invested for financial return, like you would think about in a business setting. It’s about dollars invested for student growth.
As I think about the language services space and how we position it, we need to bring resources, training, and an understanding of why we use these services to the end users. We also need to share that story with school leadership, school boards, leaders in the community, and stakeholders and share the impact that language services can make in a K-12 setting.
Identifying Gaps in K-12 Language Access
Mireya: In education, there are different layers of administration, and most or all of them are involved in the conversation surrounding language access. In many school districts, for example, language access is fragmented. You’ve got one piece being worked on in one department, and then you’ve got another piece of language access being worked on in a different department. In many situations, those departments don’t speak to one another.
There are unique school districts with superintendents and board members who understand language access and all its complexities, but it’s very rare. It’s a unicorn. What have you seen in your current role in the education field and having conversations with school leadership?
Mark: I do think there is a lot of curiosity about technology, and always a focus on compliance around state and federal legislation. But language access is not equal in all 50 states. I think there’s a lot more that we can do in schools to support our multilingual families: being more considerate of tools and putting together a comprehensive plan around language access are important.
Schools have a strategic plan, and it relates to growth and buildings and creating different services within the district, but language access is (almost) never a component of that strategic plan. What you mentioned to me was that different departments are disconnected from the work they’re doing to support language access across schools, and that’s part of the conversation that I’m trying to bridge.
If the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand’s doing, then we’re going to have a hard time helping students achieve as much success as they could possibly have. That’s true whether they’re a multilingual family or if they’re a family or student who is Deaf or hard of hearing.
Measuring Success in K-12 Language Access
Mireya: How can someone that potentially does not understand language access make the connection to how it needs to work — and its value?
Mark: Academic return on investment is an important component for school leaders to understand. Measuring and quantifying how an investment is impacting students is critical. We need to understand what students can get out of it by taking a look at the data.
Also, when you’re thinking about the role of an interpreter, one of the most important things that we’re trying to do, especially within a special education setting, is establish credibility and trust with the family. As you start talking about outplacement services for families to react to and perhaps allow their students to take advantage of the best of what your district has to offer, you will need to get buy-in from that family. A conversation in broken English is not allowing them to have meaningful participation in their child’s education.
Often, school leaders like to think about the output instead of the impact. They’re concerned with lost time, as you might think about in a manufacturing setting. But when there’s a language barrier between a family and staff, that’s lost time right there.
Say a director at a school district has a family coming in and can’t figure out how to converse with them, and they’re sitting there while the director is trying to figure out a solution; that’s lost time. Consider how many EL students you have across your district and how many interactions they have, and then you start to realize how much lost time can exist and what an incredible bottleneck that is. I only bring this up to reinforce the importance of having a strategic language access plan to train and articulate the who, how, and why of servicing these families.
Eager to learn more? Listen, watch, and subscribe to The Language Access Lectern on YouTube and piedmontglobal.com. Discover how Piedmont Global approaches interpreting, translation, and K-12 language access planning services here.
