Bilingual Counseling Assistants are "anchors" in the Southwark School community
Southwark BCAs have been noted for utilizing best practices in engaging multilingual families.
Located in South Philly, Southwark Elementary School is home to a very ethnically diverse student body. With nearly 50% English Language Learner students at the school, engaging parents is a challenge. Luckily, Southwark has a strong group of Bilingual Counseling Assistants (BCAs) to make sure that all families, regardless of language or cultural background, feel welcomed and can be involved in the school.
Last year, Southwark’s School Advisory Council was celebrated for having best practices in multilingual family engagement. The SAC focused on improving the school's inclusivity of non-English speaking families by working with the school's BCAs to help recruit parents to SAC meetings and also provide interpretation during meetings. Southwark also created “Satellite SACs” for the various language communities represented in the school and on the SAC. The “Satellite SAC” language committee meetings occur in members' native language, helping parents with limited English proficiency feel comfortable and more likely to have a meaningful SAC experience.
This year, Southwark has seven BCAs representing seven different languages: Burmese, Chinese, Indonesian, Khmer, Nepali, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Besides serving as BCAs at Southwark, they service Taggart, Key, Childs, Stephen Girard, South Philadelphia High, and Furness High School.
Part of why Southwark’s BCAs are so talented is because of the experience they bring to the job. Many of the BCAs have worked in their positions for greater than five years; one has worked as a BCA for 11 years, and another has worked as a BCA for 29 years! They were all drawn to the job because they wanted to provide a bridge between parents and the District. Through interacting with multilingual families everyday, BCAs pick up on the minuscule details that pose barriers to multilingual family engagement.
For instance, many of the District’s informational flyers include too many words or are written at a level that’s inaccessible to families. Even if these documents are translated, they are difficult for some multilingual families to comprehend, especially because some multilingual parents cannot read. A solution, the BCAs say, would be to make informational flyers and District communications more visual.
Likewise, some of the most pressing needs from families include filling out administrative forms, including application forms (to high school) and registration forms (for pre-K), and creating an understanding and bridging communication between school staff and parents, such as during IEP meetings, parent-teacher conferences, and phone calls home.
But more than helping break down language barriers, BCAs are there as a resource and a friendly face for multilingual families. “When we have a BCA in the school, it makes the parent feel welcome in the school,” says Megawati Sumana-Eishen, an Indonesian BCA at Southwark. “Because there is someone they know by the cultures and the languages. If [there is] nobody they know, sometimes they don’t wanna come to the school, even if you say you have a meeting, they don’t wanna come.”
Another Southwark BCA echoes Ms. Suman-Eishen: “They see the person, in real life.”
Having a person in the room who speaks your language and is familiar with your culture provides a huge amount of comfort and reassurance to multilingual families. Although the School District of Philadelphia provides telephonic interpretation free of charge to every school through Pacific Interpreters, having a real person in the room makes a big difference.
“Even in IEP, I’ve seen in other schools, they have the Pacific Interpreters,” Ms. Sumana-Eishen explains. “But the parents still need the live interpreters.”
“They do have trouble understanding over the phone, like, ‘Who is this speaking? Who?’" another Southwark BCA agrees. "They prefer to have [live interpretation] so they feel comfortable speaking in person rather than over the phone.”
Of course, it takes a lot of work to build meaningful, authentic relationships with multilingual families, many of whom have not been involved in their child’s school in the past or in their countries of origin. Several BCAs give out their cell phone numbers to build trust with parents and encourage communication. Creating a welcoming environment requires BCAs to assess the community—at the administration, staff, and parent levels—at the start of every school year.
It’s a process that Esther Lian, Burmese BCA at Southwark, describes as occurring in three stages—and each stage takes a full year. In her first year at Southwark, she needed to introduce the importance of multilingual families to the school, including why multilingual parents should be involved, the barriers they face, and how staff can work to welcome them into the school.
In second stage and during her second year at Southwark, Ms. Lian worked to make the parents feel welcome in the school. “Before, they just dropped their kids off and left,” she explains.
In the third stage, Ms. Lian aims to empower parents and encourage them to start regularly engaging with the school. “By this third year [at Southwark], now they have the confidence to even make a phone call to the school,” Ms. Lian says, whereas they previously would only call her. Parents are also now seeing the importance of being involved in their children’s education, particularly in groups like the SAC.
At a Professional Development session in November, BCAs brainstormed recruitment strategies for engaging multilingual families.
Ms. Sumana-Eishen agrees, saying, “Last year, nobody wanna come. But this year, they can see—everyone’s getting involved.” She makes a point of telling her parents, “if this school engages with the community, this school will be better.” When she promotes SAC as a way to improve the school for their children and for the safety of all students, parents say “they would love to come.”
“Usually it’s not easy to find a parent, but this year, at Southwark? Okay, they’re coming!” Ms. Sumana-Eishen beams.
Elsi Padilla, Spanish BCA at Southwark, concurs. She has some ver
y involved parents this year, and she has noticed that “they are not concerned about one student, they are concerned about everybody.”
Part of the positive interest in SAC is due to the great work that Southwark’s SAC has accomplished in the past year. The SAC has focused on community engagement, building a community garden, bolstering afterschool program offerings, and spearheading school improvement projects. Last year, the SAC was instrumental in helping Southwark become one of the first of Mayor Kenney’s Community Schools, and this year, through a partnership with the Community School Coordinator and the SAC, the school has brought in ESOL classes for parents.
“I think the reason why the [Community School] has been so successful is because of the people in this room,” says Kate Rymer, the AmeriCorps VISTA Community Partnerships Coordinator at Southwark. “[The BCAs] have such phenomenal access and trust within their groups. So if we didn’t have the BCAs that we do, who have established the culture that you all have with your parents, I don’t think that we would be able to reach those parents, to [help them] feel comfortable coming to English classes. I think it’s that environment [the BCAs] have created.”
At a Professional Development session in November, BCAs thought about ways to be inclusive of multilingual families during school meetings.
The BCAs emphasize, however, that they cannot do this work alone. In particular, they need the support of the school leadership team. As Ms. Lian explains, a reliable indicator of successful multilingual family engagement is when “even the principal and the school staff reach out to the families and the community.”
“Because if the principal just sits in the office, no one is going to know who is the principal. But here [at Southwark and Key Elementary Schools], the principal comes into the community,” Ms. Lian continues, “and whenever we have a parent meeting they stop by and say ‘hi.’ This kind of greeting, we might think that it’s only a small part of it, but that’s really impactful for our families and communities.”
Ms. Padilla agrees, explaining that when parents are told “they are welcomed, ‘sit down,’ things that are very simple, maybe it’ll [make the meeting] different, you know? They’ll pay attention to that person.”
“If you have effective leaders, you’ll have effective staff,” another BCA adds.
Along with strong leadership, school staff need to understand and demonstrate welcoming attitudes towards multilingual families, and this includes understanding students’ and families’ cultures and backgrounds. While language is an initial barrier to engaging multilingual families, culture can sometimes cause even deeper, more systemic barriers.
Speaking from a Southeast Asian cultural perspective, Ms. Lian explains, “When we go to school, all the things the parents give to the teachers, because the parents don’t have authority or power to talk to the teachers. But here, parents and teachers work together. So we kind of have to pull the parent from the previous culture, at least to adapt.”
BCAs have to communicate this cultural difference with both teachers and parents in Philadelphia schools. They have to tell the teachers about the cultural background and perspective of the parent, and they have to tell the parent, “this is totally different from our whole system.”
“So we explain, and we just have to be patient,” Ms. Lian says.
The work of the BCA is challenging and daunting, and the title “Bilingual Counseling Assistant” does not even begin to cover all the work that BCAs do in a school: they are case managers, social workers, and guidance counselors. “And the most important thing is? Make them feel like we are the school mom,” says Ms. Sumana-Eishen proudly. One BCA jokes, “I’m gonna put all these things on my resume!”
But despite the difficulties of the job and seemingly endless rounds of “explaining” that BCAs have to do—to parents, to staff, to principals, to District administrators—they are able to build meaningful relationships with parents and introduce them to the American education system in a positive way.
“As BCAs, we use teamwork,” Ms. Sumana-Eishen explains. “So let’s say on Tuesday, I’m not here, there’s no Indonesian. So someone will take care of my parents. If Esther’s not coming, we take care of her parents."
“We try to speak Burmese too!” Ms. Sumana-Eishen jokes, making everyone laugh. “Everyone tries to speak all the languages! We all help each other.” And if they can’t communicate, they’ll call the BCA on their cell phone.
Ms. Rymer, the AmeriCorps VISTA at Southwark, comments on how vital the BCAs are to the school’s everyday functioning. She mentions how impressive it is “seeing how integrated you all are with your families, and seeing the accessibility that you provide to them."
“Even though you’re on a rotating schedule and some of you are here more than others, families know your schedules, and even if you aren’t here, they know how to access you,” Ms. Rymer continues, proudly calling BCAs “anchors to the school” for multilingual families.
Not only do BCAs provide necessary interpretation and translation for families during meetings and in documents sent home, they also act as a tether for multilingual families, helping them to meaningfully engage with the school.
