How (and Why) One Bilingual Counseling Assistant Goes Above and Beyond the Call of Duty
It’s difficult to catch Bilingual Counseling Assistant Margarita Abuawadeh—not because she’s out the door right when the last bell rings, or because she’s unwilling to do work that goes beyond her job description. It’s quite the opposite. Ms. Abuawadeh is constantly helping others, and not just in the confines of her three assigned schools, either: she supports students, families, staff, principals, counselors, community members, and—in whatever spare time she has—tries to increase these groups’ understanding of one another.
Bilingual Counseling Assistants, or BCAs, are placed in 77 of the 221 schools in the District. Collectively, BCAs speak 35 languages, and their main objective is to provide linguistic and cultural support to non-English speaking families. There are only 57 BCAs for the entire District, meaning that many—like Ms. Abuawadeh—have to split their time among several schools.
Building relationships and gaining the trust of families is difficult at any school, and the challenge is even greater when dealing with immigrant families, some of whom may be refugees or asylum seekers who came to the U.S. to escape torture, poverty, war, or violence.
“Most of the Latin American families, when they immigrate here, it’s because of the socio-economic situations in their countries,” Ms. Abuawadeh said. “But some of them are seeking asylum, because of the violence, and gangs, and the killings, and so those families come with a lot of trauma.”
While Ms. Abuawadeh works primarily with Latin American families (she is a Spanish speaker), she also assists Syrian refugee families and Iraqi families because she speaks Arabic. She wasn’t hired as an Arabic BCA, but because of the lack of resources and the great need for skilled on-site interpreters, Ms. Abuawadeh uses the spoken Arabic that she has—she isn’t as confident with written Arabic—to help families who would otherwise have to rely on telephonic Arabic interpreters.
“You’ve got to know your family and where they’re coming from,” Ms. Abuawadeh said, and this means knowing about their country of origin, their language, their culture, and the trauma they may have encountered.
At Gilbert Spruance Elementary School in Northeast Philadelphia, one of Ms. Abuawadeh’s three schools, there is an intimidating amount of languages and cultures to keep track of. Such a range of languages and cultures makes building relationships with multilingual families challenging, to say the least.
“The main step is to have them feel comfortable,” Ms. Abuawadeh explained, “to make them feel welcome, and that they’re accepted here, and that we’re here as a community to help them become prominent citizens.”
But how do you make someone feel comfortable and welcome in a school when they’re not feeling comfortable or welcome in the country as a whole?
For Ms. Abuawadeh, it’s about finding out how she can best help the family. She starts off by introducing herself and the role she plays as a BCA in the school, including the services she provides and how she can support the student and the family. Sometimes, families are simply at the school to register their child, and other times, families come to Ms. Abuawadeh with questions about more complicated and serious matters, such as immigration and their fear of deportation.
For instance, a Guatemalan mother came into the school telling Ms. Abuawadeh that she was nervous because she had a court date and had been given a public defender. Ms. Abuawadeh gave her resources for places that would provide legal services to immigrants for free.
Once Ms. Abuawadeh helped this Guatemalan mother, more parents started coming to her for similar help and advice. “I want them to know that they have rights, that this is what they should do,” Ms. Abuawadeh said. “I did my part to connect them to community services, because that’s what we do as well.”
Although BCAs are stationed in schools, their day-to-day work involves much more than just navigating the educational system in Philadelphia. They encounter families who are dealing with serious problems and being confronted with life-altering decisions.
“These are real situations,” Ms. Abuawadeh emphasized. “This is like, ‘food, or no food?’ ‘Jail, or education?’”
The Guatemalan mother that Ms. Abuawadeh helped earlier in the school year recently came back to her asking for advice on whether she should pull her older son out of school so that he could work full-time to support the family in case she gets deported.
“It’s really hard for them to kind of prioritize,” Ms. Abuawadeh said, “because, they know if they go back, they know the situation they’re going back to, but if they can spare leaving a 14-year-old behind, so that he can work and send money to the family…terrible situation to be in.”
Many parents are facing the decision of whether to try to obtain or renew their visa or return to their home country. With either option, parents must face the potential of being separated from their children: if they decide to return to their home country, they may choose to have their children stay in the U.S. so they can eventually gain citizenship; if they decide to stay in the U.S. themselves and obtain their documents, they risk being exposed as undocumented immigrants and being deported as a result.
Ms. Abuawadeh hears about these kinds of heart-wrenching, no-win situations all the time through her job. “I’ve even had families come and ask me if they could put me down as their proxy to be able to take care of the kids and ship them over if [the parents were to get deported,]” she said. “I mean, it’s bad.”
While immigration has been front and center in the news lately because of the Trump administration’s executive orders, the families that Ms. Abuawadeh works with have been living with the fear of being deported for a long time.
“They all have the same fear, which is getting deported,” she explained. “But these are the situations: either they’re deciding to separate the family, or they’re deciding whether to expose themselves by getting double citizenship and taking that extra step, and knowing that they’re risking exposure and deportation.”
If the child was born in the U.S., they of course have automatic U.S. citizenship. But what happens if the parents, who do not have citizenship or the proper documents, get deported?
In most cases, Ms. Abuawadeh said, parents who are nervous about being deported identify a trusted relative or friend to take custody of their child so as to avoid having the child enter state custody. But even this is a risk, because that individual will also have to show identification and proof of citizenship if they are to obtain custody of the child.
“So, who do you pick?” Ms. Abuawadeh asked. “Who do you know? You don’t know anyone here really, unless you’ve been here for a really long time, and you may have a friend who is a citizen and might be willing to take that responsibility.”
Although Ms. Abuawadeh has never been in such a situation because she was born and raised in the U.S., she said that by showing empathy with the family and working hard to find and connect them to the right resources, she is able to gain their trust.
“They know if you’re being honest, they know if you’re being wholeheartedly truthful, and they know if you are genuinely concerned about what their needs are,” she explained. “If you don’t have that, they will never open up to you.”
Ms. Abuawadeh admitted that relationship-building is also dependent on a “gut feeling” that the families have, and that being of their culture goes a long way towards gaining their trust. Many problems that children struggle with—academically, socially, or behaviorally—may be swept under the rug because they’re taboo in the family’s culture.
“[Parents] want to say, ‘okay, we’ll go to America, and in America, they’ll get a better education,” she explained. “But when the kids come, and they’re dealing with the same issues, then they start to realize that there’s a problem, and in order for you to get them to open up and say, ‘okay, well I’m gonna have to see a doctor, I’m gonna have to go and get this child therapy or medication’…it’s hard. It’s hard for any parent, especially a parent who’s moving their whole life to another country in order to seek better education for their kids.”
Beyond providing linguistic support through interpretation at meetings and translation of any school-specific documents, BCAs act as cultural navigators and cultural interpreters for the families they assist.
Ms. Abuawadeh has noticed, for instance, that many of the Latin American families she works with consider the school staff to be “like extended family,” meaning that they have authority over the children in a similar way as the children’s parents do.
“The children are not allowed to be disrespectful to the teachers,” she explained. “You allow autonomy almost to the staff and to the principal to do what they think is best for the child, because you’re considered an extended member of the family.”
The differences between cultural expectations and classroom expectations can lead to some serious miscommunication and mishaps, however, which are oftentimes made worse by the language barrier.
“So when they come here to America and see the disproportionate ways of how kids interact with adults and authority, it’s something unbelievable for them,” Ms. Abuawadeh continued, “and either they act in disbelief and totally reject what they’re seeing…but a lot of them are trying to fit in and they’ll say, ‘Well I’m gonna do that too,’ and ‘This is freedom, and I can talk back,’ and then they get themselves in so much trouble.”
From what Ms. Abuawadeh sees, the majority of students from Latin America act out in this way because they’re trying to fit in—to prove that they are American, and because they think this kind of behavior is the norm.
Through her role in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Ms. Abuawadeh was able to meet Governor Tom Wolf.
Children’s behavior is also influenced by their parents, of course, and in the case of immigrant children, recent months have been especially stressful for this reason. Many immigrant parents are struggling with whether to stay in the U.S. and risk deportation or return to their home countries, and the anxiety of what to do is weighing on students, too, Ms. Abuawadeh said.
“It’s impacting the kids and the school,” she noted. “These kids are hearing this. They’re hearing their parents say, ‘immigration’s going to come and they’re going to deport us, what are we gonna do?’ And that puts a lot of anxiety on the kids, without them even knowing.”
She gave an example to illustrate her point: A teacher has been calling Ms. Abuawadeh about a certain student who had been having behavioral issues in class. The student’s mother had recently returned to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in order to renew her visa and left her son with a trusted friend.
“Smart as a whip, mind you,” Ms. Abuawadeh said describing the student, “but how do we know that? Because there’s a language barrier—‘oh he doesn’t know that.’ So I had to sit with him, see where he is cognitively. Academically, he’s fine, he’s on par.” Socially-behaviorally, however, he was struggling, but his temporary guardian couldn’t provide the support at home that he needed, such as taking him to the doctor or to therapy—he needed his mother to return to the U.S.
“So in the meantime what do we do?” Ms. Abuawadeh asked. “Bring the kid in during the days that I’m here, which is only twice a week…I try to find him two mentors who are from the same country as he is, who the teacher can call. Then I speak to the dean. Dean says, ‘kid doesn’t have any pink slips yet’…if there were pink slips we could intervene, get STS, and so on.”
“We couldn’t do that and mom wasn’t around yet,” she continued to explain, so she took responsibility for keeping an eye on him during school hours, on top of all of her regular work: interpreting for a psychologist, calling parents to schedule them for an early intervention meeting, explaining school registration to parents, and filling out paperwork, to name a few things.
BCAs do have the opportunity to speak with and sometimes formally train school staff about the special needs and challenges of immigrant and multilingual families and students. Ms. Abuawadeh, for example, has given workshops on cultural competency, religious differences, and what to expect from immigrant students.
What would help the most, Ms. Abuawadeh believes, is hiring more BCAs. “Having someone there that they can culturally and linguistically connect with is so much better than a telephonic interpreter,” she said. “That is so impersonal.”
Not having a live interpreter—someone who is consistently at the school and can understand the nonverbal queues that come with communication—is a major barrier to multilingual families. Although the District pays for Pacific Interpreters (telephonic interpretation) at all schools, speaking through a virtual interpreter is simply less comfortable than speaking through a live interpreter.
There are also school-based policies that disproportionately pose barriers to immigrant families. For instance, it is common policy in schools to show identification before entering the building, but for immigrant families who are undocumented, this can feel intimidating and risky.
“Some of these parents are not walking around with their IDs because they don’t wanna be identified,” explained Ms. Abuawadeh.
Another barrier that multilingual families face is receiving documents in their own language—something that should not be a barrier in the School District of Philadelphia.
“The documents are available in all languages!” Ms. Abuawadeh said, exasperated. “The Translation department [of the FACE Office] has never been so wonderful as they have been in the last few years. They’re like superheroes…everything’s available.”
“But the staff doesn’t download them!” Ms. Abuawadeh continued. “They don’t put them out. I make copies, I take the Spanish copies and I’ll bring it to the main office.” Once all the translated documents have been taken, however, staff often do not replace them; instead, they depend on Ms. Abuawadeh or another BCA to take care of all translation needs.
“I can’t be here to do that for you guys, I’m not here everyday,” Ms. Abuawadeh explained, half-joking and half-serious. “Keep it in the back of your heads…Keep it on your desktop, make copies—don’t ask me for it later!”
Luckily, the schools that Ms. Abuawadeh works with this year are top-notch—they care about involving multilingual families, and they take the time to speak with Ms. Abuawadeh about what she sees in the field. “I mean Mr. Lang,” she said, talking about the principal of Spruance Elementary, “he’s the best.”
“If the principal’s behind you and the counselor is,” she continued, “you can do a world of good.”
To Ms. Abuawadeh, educating the school staff is extremely important. “Letting them know about the cultural barriers—it’s not just language,” she said.
Monolingual staff at the school are also overworked and strapped for time, of course. Ms. Abuawadeh understands how the added responsibility of providing interpretation during meetings and translating documents can seem like another burden on school staff.
“They’re dealing with enough, right?” she admitted. “Everyone has their responsibilities at work, and I get it, I understand it. It’s just another barrier for them—to have to deal with someone that they cannot communicate well with, or that they would need a third party or interpreter services to communicate.”
It’s up to the BCA, therefore, to articulate the importance of taking the time and making the effort to accommodate multilingual families and students. “Going to the principal, and the staff members, and the counselor, and the deans, and special ed,” Ms. Abuawadeh said, explaining her strategy for working with school staff. “You have to have a good relationship with everybody in the building in order for you to get good access for the families and for the child.”
In this way, the work of the BCA is both an internal challenge and external one. “It’s a roller coaster kind of a job,” Ms. Abuawadeh said thoughtfully, “because you have to be in tune with all the little things that are going on.”
Building a relationship with the principal and counselor at multiple schools is a difficult task. “I leave here barely with any breath,” Ms. Abuawadeh said.
Despite barely ever getting a break in her job as a BCA, Ms. Abuawadeh sits on the board for CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and is involved with the New Sanctuary Movement and the Interfaith Walk for Peace. Her connections to social justice organizations and the religious sector help her in her BCA job, too. Ms. Abuawadeh often pairs refugee families who are Muslim with mosques in the area.
Although her work as a BCA is tiring, unrelenting, and sometimes thankless (she still doesn’t have a District laptop), Ms. Abuawadeh knows that she’s contributing to making immigrant families feel more welcome in schools and in the city. Ultimately, when immigrant, refugee, and multilingual families feel welcome in a school, “they’ll be more willing to come to you, and come to the school, and be more active.”
