Voces Comunitarias: Honoring Latino Community Voices

As Co-Chair of the 2019 award-winning School Improvement Council (SIC) at Walhalla High School (WHS), we wanted to improve school communication and support for Multilingual Learners (MLL) and their families. Since I was not bilingual and not a member of the Latino community, I knew we had to begin by forming relationships with trusted bilingual community leaders to help us understand our Latino community’s cultural values and needs.

By leveraging the expertise of community leaders, we successfully hosted the first annual School Wellness Community Resource Fair, explicitly designed to welcome and support Latino family members in our school community. Para Todos was held in the old WHS soccer stadium, a space that is walkable and familiar to the Latino community. The event was scheduled to coincide with the yearly WHS Alumni Soccer game. We recruited Latino food vendors and required all community organizations to share materials in Spanish and English. We also had a bilingual staff member available to meet with families. The event was well-attended by Latino families in Walhalla and was so successful it became an annual event.

I still use what I learned through this leadership experience on SIC to guide my work as a Carolina Family Engagement Center Family Liaison.  

Modeling many of the family-school-community partnership strategies used in the Para Todos event, the Community Family Resource Center (CRFC) implementation at the Walhalla Branch of the Oconee County Public Library (OCPL) launched in 2022. Under the leadership of Superintendent Molly Spearman, the South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) partnered with CFEC to develop CRFCs across the state.

These centers are designed to share essential resources to help families support children’s learning and development in places where families typically go shopping, get gas, do laundry, or pay the water bill. 

What is unique about the CRFC in Walhalla is that all materials are in English and Spanish. CFEC partnered with Blair Hinson, OCPL Director; Nivia Miranda, Bilingual Facilitator at James M. Brown Elementary School and OCPL board member; and Sarai Melendez, Walhalla City Councilwoman, to ensure that this CRFC was a good fit for our community and a winning solution for all involved.

The staff invests in making the library a community hub and welcoming space for Latino community members. In addition to the CRFC, they employ a part-time social worker, part-time interpreter, and full-time bilingual community member. They intentionally partner with community organizations and bilingual community health workers to host informational events in Spanish and family events that honor the Latino culture. They partner with the local school district to provide free summer meals and serve as a local Food Share program distribution site. All events take place in or adjacent to the CRFC. If families need information about getting the help they need, bilingual staff members and volunteers direct them to the best resources in our community.

All these efforts help build a community of belonging — one relationship at a time. 

Recently, new immigrant moms gathered for a workshop at the library where they received free diapers, and their children enjoyed a free meal during the holiday break. These moms had an opportunity to ask volunteer bilingual community health workers questions about accessing healthcare and enrolling their children in school. They expressed surprise that so much help was available at no cost and wondered why community members cared about them; they did not expect to feel accepted in this way. This is another illustration of the power of the Walhalla CRFC.

Many MLL families don’t feel comfortable using resources available at the library or entering their child’s school building to ask for help. Most schools have locked doors and require a picture ID to enter the building. Some schools are ill-equipped to serve families who are English learners, so families may not have access to an interpreter, and materials with important information about their child’s education may not be available in a parent’s home language. Some MLL families face challenges in digital literacy and may only have a grade school education in their home country — making it difficult to know how to navigate the U. S. education system.

CFEC and the Walhalla CRFC help families bridge this gap by providing the resources and support they need to advocate for their child’s learning, development, and educational needs.

CFEC continues to honor the voices of Latino parents in South Carolina. With the help of Councilwoman Melendez, we have recruited Latino parents to serve as a parent advisory group to share their experiences in the educational setting and inform what we do to improve outcomes for MLL students and families. This approach is transformative in that it provides a paradigm shift. Rather than using a top-down or outside-in approach to school and community decision-making, CFEC, in general, and the Walhalla school community, in particular, are learning how to level the playing field by connecting with members of the Latino community. We learn from them directly about what the community needs and how, where, and when to meet their needs.

We cannot effectively advocate for and improve outcomes for MLL students and families without inviting Latino parents and community members to sit at the decision-making table. 

This work becomes increasingly important as our Latino student and family population grows across the state. According to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute, Spanish speakers comprise 70% of South Carolina’s MLL population. The number and diversity of languages spoken by newly arriving immigrant families are also increasing. In addition to Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Vietnamese are among the top five languages spoken in South Carolina schools. There is a continuing trend of growth of the immigrant population in South Carolina, with a 135.7% increase of foreign-born immigrants and a 28.6% increase in U.S.-born, in South Carolina since 2000, demonstrating the increased diversity within the state’s population. Nearly half of these newly arriving immigrant families have at least one parent in the home who is Limited English Proficient (LEP).

To meet this challenge, schools must find creative solutions to meet language access needs, build culturally responsive relationships, and share decision-making power with MLL families to promote their children’s school success. To learn more about building authentic and intentional family-school-community partnerships, visit the CFEC website and use this toolkit to learn more about setting up a CRFC in your school community.

References

Migration Policy Institute, National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, “U.S. Young Children (ages 0 to 5) by Dual Language Learner Status: National and State Sociodemographic and Family Profiles” (data tables, MPI, Washington, DC, 2024).

Migration Policy Institute (MPI) tabulation of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), pooled for 2015-19. “State Demographics Data – SC,” accessed February 27, 2024, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/state-profiles/state/demographics/SC