Tips on Engaging Immigrant Parents

By Sara Inés Calderón

If you’re a teacher in Texas, chances are you’ve had encounters with parents who are immigrants, and may not speak English.  It wouldn’t be an oddity, considering that more than one in ten people in Texas was born in another country (that’s 2.9 million people), more than 1 out of 3 Texans speak a language other than English at home, and 36.5% of the state identifies as Hispanic*.

Although The State of Texas has historically had very strong ties to Mexico, engaging with immigrant parents (who are overwhelmingly Mexican) may not be easy for all teachers.  There are all sorts of barriers standing between teachers and immigrant parents that neither party can necessarily control; however, on the educational end, there are some things you can do to pave the way to easier communication.  Here are a few tips to help.

Different Educational Systems

• Systems:  It might help you to understand that, in other countries, public schooling is structured differently, so parents might not understand how the system works.
• Educación:  The word “educación” in Spanish is all-encompassing to mean manners, culture and other things outside academia; therefore, parents might see their role as providing one type of educación while it’s the teacher’s job to provide the other.
• Teachers as Professionals:  Teachers in Mexico and other parts of the world are seen as respected professionals, like doctors and lawyers, and might consider it disrespectful to question their authority.
• Low Educational Attainment:  Many Hispanic immigrants don’t have high educational levels when they come to the U.S., as continuing past a certain grade might require them to pay tuition.
• Multiple Languages:  Not all Hispanic immigrants speak Spanish.  Brazilians speak Portuguese and several indigenous groups have their own languages and may not speak Spanish.

Communication Strategies

• Start early:  During registration, introduce yourself to parents and explain school structure, such as grading structures or field trips, and make yourself available to them for any questions.  Also, this would be a good time to explain to parents what your expectations are for their involvement with their children’s education.
• Face-to-face:  If your parents don’t speak English, don’t understand the school system and are new to the country, they might feel more comfortable with face-to-face communication.  Try to be visible, greet parents before/after school and build rapport with parents at the beginning of the school year to lay a foundation.
• Try everything:  Make phone calls, send emails and send home flyers with your students; try every method to communicate with your parents.
• Scheduling:  Because many immigrant parents may work multiple jobs or have transportation issues, make sure you schedule meetings with plenty of advanced warning and during hours when they can attend.

Language Barrier Strategies

• Recruit Translators:  Older children who have English fluency, parents who are bilingual, staff members who are bilingual
• Native Language Use:  Whenever possible, communicate information in the parents’ native language, include phone numbers of bilingual liaisons or other staff.
• Student Translators:  Parents might use their children as translators, which could be awkward at times, but necessary if the school cannot provide another one.

General Strategies

• Goals:  At the start of the year, ask your students to brainstorm with their parents and come up with a list of goals or a study plan they’d like to accomplish that year.
• Bribes:  Give your students incentives to get their families involved in school.
• Cultural Relevance:  Incorporate aspects of your students’ culture when you can, when it corresponds with your curriculum.
• Cultural Prep:  If you feel unsure, you might want to ask a bilingual coordinator or someone else about parents’ cultural norms before you meet them.
• Recruit Volunteers: Recruit immigrant parents to be volunteers for anything you can think of; this could be especially useful if you can find a bilingual volunteer to help you recruit other immigrant parents.
• Be Empathetic:  Sometimes parents may be truly struggling to put food on the table, dealing with family illness or other hardships.  Given such circumstances, school functions may not be at the top of their priorities list.

Resources

• Engaging Immigrant Parents http://www.wilder.org/download.0.html?report=2262
• Mexican Immigrant Adolescents http://www.cedu.niu.edu/~shumow/itt/MexicanImmigrantAdolescents.pdf
• Speaking their Language: Successfully Reaching Out to Immigrant Parents http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3908
• A New Vision for Engaging Latino Families (PowerPoint) http://www.pta.org/n_pta_presentation_6_2009.ppt
• Immigrant Parents and the School http://www.nasponline.org/communications/spawareness/Immigrant%20Parents.pdf
• Building Partnerships with Immigrant Parents http://mysite.verizon.net/vze2vghs/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/nceaimmparents.pdf
• *Texas’ Foreign Born Population http://www.cpa.state.tx.us/specialrpt/undocumented/2backgrnd.html
• Educational Attainment of Foreign-Born Hispanics: 2000 and 2008 http://pewhispanic.org/files/factsheets/hispanics2008/Table%2023.pdf

When Saving is the Weakest of Your Strengths

The Opinion of an Aspiring “Crazy” Coupon Lady
Holly Smith
Cluster Specialist for Business Management Administration, Finance and Marketing

“Extreme Couponing” on TLC has me enamored.  I love watching it and seeing regular, ordinary people take bits of paper, from the newspaper or a website, and turn it into money.  I aspire to do that.  I’ve even started to coupon on my own.  I am fortunate to have a spare refrigerator in my garage, and it’s stacked with yogurt tubes and juice boxes.  My food pantry is lined with jars of pasta sauce, salad dressing, and a variety of canned food items.  My husband opened up the bathroom cabinet to fine a neat stack of toothpaste tubes and rows of his favorite body spray and deodorant.  He was even concerned enough to ask, “Is everything okay?”  And, I was gleeful.

I also find myself watching shows about hoarding around the same time at night as the coupon shows.  I watch with the same wide-eyed, rapt attention, but for different reasons.  With the coupon shows, there is a thrill seeing money saved and people stacking up groceries to the ceiling.  With the hoarding shows, there are people trapped by their own compulsion and watch their accumulations mount and mount up around them.  One show is about quick math and a tenacity to ‘beat the system’ (with a dash of greed thrown in), and the other show is a peek inside the lives of people who have lost control. 

But, as I’ve compared the two shows, I began to notice that a lot of those who take the coupon thrill ride are burgeoning hoarders themselves.  Cars are kicked out of garages, husbands are kicked out of their man caves, and even families will live surrounded by stacks of paper towels and toilet paper.   People who admit they do not have a baby nor friends with a baby have a year’s worth if diapers.  They refer to all their supplies as a “stock pile” and even have plans to hand it down to children.  (Even boxed cereals and canned foods have an expiration date, people.)  And, who can use 500 toothbrushes?  Most of the couponers I’ve watched have good intentions.  They started this because of a loss of income normally.  A single income forced a radical shift in priorities.  I think about my teachers in this regard, how many of them have saved every scrap of paper that had, at one time helped them, because there was probably nothing else available for them.

Now the “ouchy” questions arise.   Do you have one desk drawer in your classroom that holds items for which you have no memories?  Do you shove items into the back of a closet because you don’t have time to deal with going through them and it’s a bit embarrassing to have them out in the open?  Do your filing cabinets have items older than your children? For the rules of the bedroom closet, if you haven’t worn it in two years, donate it.  If you haven’t taught it in 3-5 years, at the very least, scan the documents and recycle the paper.  Does the information even come close to matching up with the current TEKS?  Do you have pens from your CTSO that don’t work, but you’ve kept them anyway?  Toss them.  Have the items from your classroom crept into the trunk and backseat of your car?  Then, do they crawl their way into a corner of your house?  Invest into some high school help this summer and scan it, save it, and recycle it.  Take some time to get on top of your stockpile before it kicks someone you love out of their favorite part of the house.

I think most of us are somewhere between a couponing person and a hoarding person.  We know that saving all of the years of teaching information is valuable because we never know when we’ll need it.  It’s useful and, in a way, it’s a testament to how we’ve carefully saved our information over the years.  We enjoy being the go person on this knowledge the same way a couponer enjoys hearing people applaud when five filled grocery carts only cost $12.98.  We have the equivalent of a couponer’s “stockpile” or a hoarder’s…….living room.  But, we have to make sure we aren’t burying ourselves in years of outdated materials.  The easy solution to our situation is that we have technology on our side.  Instead of keeping 30 stapled copies of our favorite test, let’s scan in one and get rid of the rest.  Don’t let your instinct to save keep you from taking advantage of your “stockpile” of items.  Don’t amass so much information that you can’t use any of it because you can’t find it.

Don’t get me wrong, this week I will be buying 8 packages of my dog’s favorite treats because the store is having a “buy one, get one free” (BOGO for those in the know) sale, and I also have four “BOGO” coupon.  I will walk out of the store with eight bags of free dog treats because I know that we will use them.  I also know the sales cycle for most grocery items go on sale every 8-12 weeks.  I buy just enough to get us through, and then I’ll get more the next time round.  I am not going to let the thrill of having a good a treasure of any item overtake my ability to recognize how much I actually need.  For now, knowing that fact means I can remove the “crazy” from my “Aspiring Coupon Lady” title.