Lehman College announced in November it received federal funding of $8.4 million to train multilingual teachers for Bronx schools. This week, we asked readers if, in their opinion, public school teachers are equipped to handle the high percentage of Bronx students in their classrooms for whom English is not the first language spoken at home.

 

“No, they’re not equipped. First of all, a lot of the teachers cannot really identify with the [affected] children. Whether they’re African American children, or Latinos, whether they speak Spanish or another language because to me, they’re not being properly trained. A lot of teachers have backgrounds where they live upstate or are coming from backgrounds where they can’t really identify with a particular child.”

Heather Guerino 

Norwood

“No, I don’t think all of them are prepared, and I’ve been saying this for a while that they need a major upgrade in the education system. The CUNY money given to [Herbert H.] Lehman College will help, yes, because a lot of them don’t have what they need. We know how the education system started, and it wasn’t properly funded, and we know they’re not getting an Ivy League education so that should tell us something right there.”

Tyrone Randolph,

Burnside

“No, I don’t think they are. I think they need to be more educated on how to teach the students that don’t speak English [as a first language] at home. I remember I grew up in a bilingual class and most of the subjects taught to me were in Spanish and English, so it was both languages. So, we had Spanish teachers, but they also spoke English. Most of our teachers were bilingual. I believe they no longer have that in schools today, just English.”

Clara Martinez,

Kingsbridge

“My thoughts on this are from the perspective of a parent with children that go to public school. Also, my husband is a teacher, so I would have to say I haven’t seen this necessarily, because my children go to a school where they’re not necessarily set up to handle people who are new to the country. My children go to a school where there’s people that are not born in the United States, but their English is functional.”

Lisa Perrine,

Pelham Parkway

 

“I think it’s a case-by-case situation. There have always been students who don’t speak English at home. This is nothing new. These students should be offered English as a Second Language (ESL)-type class that native speakers don’t have to take.”

Charlie Vazquez,

Pelham Parkway

 

Editor’s Note: Norwood News contacted NYC Department of Education to ask if they could share the percentage of bilingual or multilingual public-school teachers in The Bronx. We were informed that about 3.5 percent of active teachers in The Bronx hold a bilingual license.