TESTIMONY
Aracelis Lucero, Executive Director of Masa, on the Challenges and Solutions for Immigrant Families in Remote Learning
2:03:21
·
3 min
Aracelis Lucero, Executive Director of Masa, addresses the systemic obstacles immigrant families encounter in education, focusing on remote learning.
- Lucero highlights the significant barriers immigrant families in the South Bronx face, including language, income, education level, and technological gaps.
- She criticizes the public education system's lack of preparedness to offer equitable remote learning, sharing a personal struggle to facilitate her child's education.
- Lucero proposes recommendations for enhancing support to immigrant families, emphasizing the necessity of rights education, technological assistance, culturally competent staff, and leveraging community-based organizations.
- She urges the review and proper utilization of funds allocated for immigrant family communications and calls for restored funding for early childhood education programs.
Aracelis Lucero
2:03:21
Good afternoon, and thank you so much, Chair Joseph, and every and the members of the Education Committee for this opportunity to test Fi.
2:03:27
My name is Araceli's.
2:03:28
I'm the executive director of Masa.
2:03:30
We're a community based organization that's based in the South Bronx who has over 2 decades of experience serving recently arrived, immigrants and indigenous communities, providing them with critical services around education, family wraparound support services, and advocacy and leadership opportunities.
2:03:46
We serve a population that is often considered hard to reach, led mostly by parents who are undocumented, nearly a third of our parents have less than a primary school education and 2 thirds less than a secondary school education over a third speaking indigenous language such as Miseko, Nawa, Kichuan, Wolov, Mamt, to name a few, and the majority have an annual income of $30,000 or less.
2:04:11
55% of our families actually have no income at all.
2:04:14
Parents in this community and by extension the beautiful children under their care face significant barriers to achieve social and economic stability, limiting their ability to fully integrate in our society.
2:04:25
However, we have witnessed time and time again how language barriers, the digital divide, and varying degrees of literacy levels impacts immigrant parents, and how they do not receive the information they need to properly support, advocate for, and be empowered to be their children's first teacher as they have every right to be.
2:04:43
A clear example as we all have heard today was a lack of preparedness of our public education system to provide an edit equitable access to quality education for all of our students, including just the basic assurance of day to day learning.
2:04:58
We clearly saw that even though there were attempts to prepare families, and children for remote learning, there has existed massive gaps in communication and adequate support, especially for immigrant families to ensure that them and their children have the proper tools and knowledge to continue with their learning.
2:05:16
I have a higher degree.
2:05:19
I'm technologically savvy.
2:05:21
I made a valiant effort that day to try to log in just like you I was scrambling.
2:05:27
I had to give my child my work computer because Zoom wasn't marking.
2:05:32
On his iPad had to reset, and we really couldn't get on until after 45 minutes.
2:05:38
Of rebooting and trying to triage.
2:05:41
So I can only imagine what our immigrant families were experiencing, and we did get word from our families, that many of them were facing challenges.
2:05:51
A lot of them didn't know how to log in, understood what was expected for them during that day.
2:05:56
I myself had to not work the whole day just to, like, print out assignments.
2:06:00
And so, again, with all the challenges that are immigrant families and students in temporary housing have, it's really unfair that we were just that ill equipped, and this is not like recent.
2:06:12
So we have 3 recommendations.
2:06:14
Immigrant families deserve to know their rights and schools to have dedicated technological support and to have access to culturally and linguistically competent staff who can help them navigate our massive school system.
2:06:24
We should especially ensure indigenous speakers and speakers of other languages less commonly spoken are not forgotten, which is very often the case.
2:06:31
While this ideally should live within the schools, the experience of culturally competent CBOs who have already been engaged in this work should be leveraged and additional funding should be provided increase their capacity to support newcomer and immigrant families.
2:06:44
A funding stream that I would like to emphasize on is the $4,000,000 allocation from City Council to the DOE for immigrant family communications, which we should just review and make sure that we understand how that money is being used and how it's supporting our families.
2:07:00
I'd also like to advocate for fully restoring funding toward 3 k and pre k programs.
2:07:06
And just better supports for immigrant children and families.
2:07:09
Thank you so much for your time.