One thing we try to do is have the written agenda, detailed minutes, and Treasurer's report in English and Spanish. We can save time, by having people read over and then just have a minimal amount of discussion on the old info, unless there are questions. Our meetings are once a month, having from 20-40 parents attending (our first meeting had 53 parents) and last from 7:00-8:30 or 8:45. The translators are well versed in our activities, so they are pretty efficient. I would not want to sacrifice the input and participation of all families. Plus, I get to work on my Spanish!
We have two meetings at our school. We did it last month for the first time. At 6:30, the ESOL teacher and the VP who speaks spanish met with the spanish speaking parents. Then we had our English speaking meeting at 7pm. We had a great turn out and they truly appreciated knowing we were doing this. We plan on doing this with all of our meetings, with the hopes by the end of the year that they will feel comfortable in the 7pm meeting. It also let them know that there were people at the school that could talk to them if they wanted to call or send in notes in Spanish.
Our school is 85% Hispanic... our Spanish speaking population is huge, so I understand your dilemma. How do you have a effecient meeting while not excluding non-English speaking parents?
Currently, we use the back-and-forth method of translation and our meeting attendence is between 40-60 people... with approx. 1/2 being non- English speakers. Yes... this definitely makes our meetings longer. Yet, we have found that it is the best way for allowing non-English speakers to actually participate in the meeting... which, as president, is my priority. (I would much prefer people offering comments and voicing concerns than just sitting there with blank expressions on their faces!) Our school district does have a headset system that allows more discrete, nearly simultaneous translation... but our members feel that they're always a few moments behind when wearing them; thus, we have made the choice that back-and-forth translation is better for our community.
Since our meetings are longer because of translation, we have chosen to have our general membership meetings every other month. This will be our third year of doing this. What we have found is that parents are more accommodating of the longer meeting length now that they know it only happens 5 times a year! (I have only received 2 complaints in 2 years about this... and once I explained that our Spanish speakers feel better with the longer method of translation we're using, the complainers were fine.)
Another school in our district, dealing with the same issue on a lesser scale, chose to set up a seperate Spanish PTO meeting. This quickly failed. The Spanish speaking parents didn't respond well to a seperate meeting... now, they don't have any involvement from this group.
I hope these anecdotes help you with this issue... it's a hard one to solve! Good luck with whatever path you take!
I need suggestions please!! Our school has a large portion of students and parents who are only Spanish speaking. They make a great effort to attend the general meetings, we just don't know how to keep them involved in the meeting if the majority of it is in English. We've tried to translate back and forth but that made the meeting drag on longer. We've also tried to have our Spanish Speaking committee coordinator give the meeting in Spanish while I go through it in English. We just end up talking over each other and it becomes very confusing. I feel like we have parents up at school so often I would hate to have to set another date for a Spanish meeting. Suggestions?? :confused:
