Cesar cuts steel for a demolition company. Every day he is at work by 6:30 a.m., and he often works seven days a week. After he returns home, he practices reading and writing in English with his children before heading to his evening English as a Second Language (ESL) class at a nearby community center in Arlington, Virginia. Cesar's education in the countryside of El Salvador was interrupted after only five years by civil war and the need to help support his family. Despite these obstacles, Cesar is learning English alongside his children, and he dreams of becoming an electrician.
Ilham is a housekeeper in a bustling hotel in Washington, D.C. Although the Iraqi immigrant is tired when she returns to Virginia in the afternoon, she looks over her son's schoolwork, and if she has the energy, she speaks with him in her native Kurdish, a language he does not understand as well as English. Although Ilham's job is taxing and her English class is difficult—unlike most of her classmates, she is not accustomed to the Roman alphabet—she is optimistic about her son's prospects. "For myself, I don't care; I want to help my son for the future. I want him to go to college."
Daysi cooks for a prestigious restaurant a few blocks from the White House. She misses her 12-year-old son, who lives with relatives in El Salvador. Every day after work, she picks up her 10-year-old daughter—who has been in the United States for two years—at school. Daysi looks over her daughter's assignments, and her daughter translates school correspondence. Daysi is taking English and computer training courses at the community center. One day she may become a sec-re-tar-y, she says, pronouncing each syllable carefully and with gusto.
Immigrant parents, such as Cesar, Ilham, and Daysi, exemplify the qualities that we seek to instill in our children: they are hardworking, persistent, ambitious, compassionate—and they value education. Yet these parents often work long or irregular hours, sometimes holding down two jobs, and may have limited English proficiency or a fear of formal communication in English.
How, then, can teachers reach out to immigrant parents and involve them in their children's education and in the life of the school? To find out, I investigated the kinds of programs available to my adult ESL students in Arlington County, Virginia, and then asked my students what helps them most.
A Community from Around the World
Arlington County's diversity is mirrored in its elementary school population. At the start of the 1998–99 school year, almost 3,000 pupils—32 percent of the K–6 population—were enrolled in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) or High-Intensity Language Training (HILT) classes (Arlington Public Schools, 2000). Although these students speak 59 different languages ranging from Spanish and Urdu to Tigrinya, Tagalog, Uzbek, and Dinka, 75 percent speak Spanish (Arlington Public Schools, 2000). In response to this multicultural population's needs, Arlington's elementary schools provide a wide array of services: several schools employ bilingual resource assistants or community liaisons; some print correspondence in Spanish; and a few offer family literacy programs.
Educators at two Arlington schools have designed evening programs to help immigrant parents and students acclimate to U.S. schooling practices. At Randolph Elementary School—where, at the start of the 1998–99 school year, 45 percent of the students were enrolled in ESOL/HILT classes (Arlington Public Schools, 2000)—an evening program for the families of non-native kindergartners helps them become involved in the school, according to Principal Kathy Panfil.
Now in its third year, Family Night School—offered two to three nights a week for five to seven weeks, three times a year—introduces immigrant parents to the school and to teachers' expectations. It also familiarizes them with routines at home that will help their children succeed in school. At the same time, Randolph's teachers help children with socialization skills, such as standing in line and taking turns, and work with them on colors, shapes, and counting skills. Siblings of the kindergartners participate in a homework club, and at the conclusion of the evening, parents and children engage in paired activities, such as math games or flash cards.
The program grew out of a neighborhood association's wish to strengthen school-parent ties. The association received a state grant to pay school staff for overtime hours; in 2001, a corporate grant will allow Randolph staff to extend the program to families with older children. The planning and extra staff hours have paid off, Panfil says. When her staff calls parents to come in for a conference or meeting, the parents come—and they look relaxed.
At Glencarlyn Elementary, a family meeting night every other week for the first seven months of the year allows parents to find out what their children are doing in school, according to Principal Christine Sutton. Most of the 25 families who participated in 1999–2000 were nonnative, she said. At the start of the 1998 school year, 55 percent of the students at Glencarlyn were enrolled in ESOL/HILT classes (Arlington Public Schools, 2000).
On a typical meeting night, the school serves refreshments, and then children go to another room for activities while Glencarlyn teachers make one-hour presentations to parents. This can be a "make-and-take," in which parents make homework kits, or a demonstration on such topics as how to help children with homework or how to participate in parent-teacher conferences. The school employs two parent liaisons who run the program.
This year, staff at Glencarlyn are trying a new approach: asking some parents to commit to spending time in their children's classrooms, with teachers selecting times when they will demonstrate an activity, such as setting up a science project. The goal is to enable parents to continue the activity with their children at home. Sutton says that this approach could replace the nightly meetings and ease the time commitment for staff.
Communicating with Parents
Despite outreach efforts, communication may still be difficult, as Cesar learned. When his daughter was in kindergarten, he got a call at his construction company from his daughter's teacher, who asked why he hadn't come to a parent-teacher conference. Cesar didn't know about the meeting, which the teacher had announced in a letter sent home with his daughter, and was grateful for the call at work. After that, Cesar's wife met once a month with the kindergarten teacher and a Spanish teacher to discuss their daughter's progress.
Catching a parent for a five-minute phone call is one thing—and often no small feat. Yet finding the time for a half-hour meeting is another challenge for parents who may work more than one job or have a long commute from the workplace to school. Daysi has found it difficult to return from her job in Washington, D.C., to the suburbs to attend a parent-teacher meeting—and impossible to make it back to work. Like many immigrant parents, however, she works on weekends and has one day off during the week. She scheduled all individual conferences for her day off, and since then, Daysi has attended several meetings.
Sutton says that when she was a teacher at Glencarlyn, she sent home "letters that were very few words and mostly pictures. So, if I wanted to send something home about a field trip, I would try to use clip art," with pictures of the bus, lunch, and the time of the trip.
Likewise, faculty at Glencarlyn depend on children, Sutton says. "Starting with 1st grade and up, we make sure that the child knows what we're talking about; part of their homework is to explain it to their parents. They are probably our best messengers—and it seems to work."
Immigrant parents acknowledge that sometimes they are scared when the teacher calls them and they don't understand what the teacher wants. At home, the child can translate for them, but they don't have such assistance at work. It's helpful to have a follow-up letter from the teacher that their children can translate; Daysi and Cesar have also benefited from a bilingual staff at school to help translate at teacher conferences.
But what about parents like Ilham, whose native language—Kurdish—is spoken by only a fragment of the population?
Tips for Communicating with Parents
Tips for Communicating with Parents
Call parents at work, where they are likely reachable, and send a letter home the next day to confirm a meeting time and place.
Schedule parent-teacher conferences on parents' days off.
Send letters home each week describing what their children did in school. Ask the children to read the letters to their parents and talk about what they're learning.
Schedule a monthly time to meet individually with interested parents so they can learn about their children's progress and what they need to practice at home.
Reaching Non-Spanish-Speaking Parents
Although she is studying English, Ilham is still frustrated by her lack of proficiency and does not feel confident enough to attend teachers' meetings by herself. She relies on her husband, who works the night shift as a hotel bellman. Ilham reviews the papers that her son brings home from school, however, and her son translates when necessary. She makes a point to talk with her son's teachers when she picks him up from school on her day off.
Educators have found ways to involve parents whose language is not spoken by anyone on the school staff. Sutton uses what she calls the "extended family approach." When families register their child at the county intake center, which provides translation and interpretation services to schools, they must take the registration form to the elementary school. Often, Sutton says, a relative with more proficiency in English accompanies the parents and child. Sutton has Glencarlyn staff get the relative's name and lists him or her as an emergency contact.
Sutton and Panfil say that their schools frequently rely on the county intake center, whose interpreters come to schools for parent-teacher conferences. Although it can take weeks to schedule a conference with an interpreter, Sutton says, "We always try to have someone on hand who speaks the native language of the parent." She adds, "The scheduling nightmare comes when you have to get all the Khmer families in at one time because there's only one person in the county school system who speaks that language." But she adds that Glencarlyn gets almost 100 percent participation at parent-teacher conferences.
Different Cultures, Different Schools
In addition to having precious little time for parent-teacher conferences and other school activities, parents whose children are starting school in the United States may face confusion and difficulty coping with educational practices that are different from their own.
These differences may prevent nonnative parents from taking a more active role in their children's education, says Kate Singleton, who has taught ESL to hundreds of nonnative parents in Arlington over the past nine years. Some parents fear teachers, she has noticed. "The teacher, like the doctor, is seen as an authority figure who's not to be questioned." The rule in many cultures is that "there's no problem unless the school contacts me."
In addition to cultural differences related to schooling, nonnative parents may face daunting literacy expectations. An Egyptian student in Singleton's class burst into tears as she recounted how her son's Head Start teacher admonished her for not reading a book to her child each night. She was illiterate both in English and in her native Arabic.
Yet educators have found ways to bridge the literacy gap. Panfil says, "We want nonliterate parents to understand that they can still say to their child, 'Show me your homework'" even if they can't read it. Teachers in Randolph's Family Night School assign follow-up activities that parents can complete without reading or writing.
"I learned a long time ago not to rely on the printed word for anyone," says Sutton. "We are careful not to assume that parents will understand just because we send it home in writing." She says that the Glencarlyn staff communicates with parents who don't respond in other ways through home visits by a school social worker.
In Partnerships with Linguistic Minority Communities (1998), Mary McGroarty proposes teacher- and classroom-based means to promote school partnerships. Among them is "Encourage parents to talk with students daily for at least 15 minutes and have younger students read aloud at home, in any language, at least two to four times each week" (p. 11). Such an activity does not call for literacy on the part of immigrant parents.
Even for immigrants with years of education in their native countries, the introduction to U.S. schooling practices can stir anxiety. When Ilham's son was in kindergarten, her husband went to a parent-teacher conference and discovered that their son didn't understand class exercises and wasn't doing his homework. The teacher opened a book and showed Ilham's husband exactly what their son needed to learn and practice at home.
Ilham had no idea that her son had been assigned homework and felt angry and frustrated. "Nobody told me what to do with my child in school. Kindergarten is very important here. In my country, children start school at age 6. There's no homework for 5-year-olds."
Diversity and Richness
Although tricky, dealing with nonnative parents is one of the most rewarding parts of many educators' jobs. "If I'm working with a parent who's interacting with the school for the first time, I'm laying the groundwork for what's going to happen later on," Panfil says. "If the parent feels welcome in the office, the parent can come back and let me know whether the child has special needs." Seeing immigrant parents who are excited to participate in the life of a school for the first time is rewarding. "Other parents may become jaded and take this for granted."
Sutton agrees. "People who've come to this country recognize that education is important," she says. "The families are so supportive of the school."
Adds Panfil, "These children are cultural strengths for the whole school."
