On September 19th at 7 PM EDT, Citizens for Public Education’s Multilingual Education in MA will host a webinar titled “Learning from the Past and Present to Empower Future Learners.” This is the first of three virtual sessions exploring multilingual education in Massachusetts.
Panelists include Roger Rice, a lawyer and Executive Director of Multicultural Education, Training & Advocacy, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization that focuses on the rights of English Learners and immigrant students. He was involved in the effort to defeat the Unz initiative that repealed bilingual education in Massachusetts and also in litigation that sought to prevent the MCAS graduation test requirement. He has represented EL students in Boston, Chelsea, Lowell, Lynn, Holyoke, and elsewhere in Massachusetts. Dr. Debbie Zacarian of Zacarian & Associates. Dr. Zacarian brings over three decades of combined experience as an educational service agency administrator, university faculty member, and school district leader. With over 100 publications on promising PreK-16 instructional, leadership, and family-school partnership practices with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, some of her most recent books include Identity Safe Spaces at Home and School: Partnering to Overcome Inequity and Transforming Schools for Multilingual Learners: A Comprehensive Guide for Educators, 2nd edition. Sugey Rondon is a mother of three. She joined SSYP in 2019, starting as a volunteer parent leader and later as a staff member. She is currently a Family Organizer, teaching families the importance of involvement in their children’s schools. Sugey has a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing from the Universidad Tecnológica de Santiago DR. She came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 2016. Sugey loves family togetherness, sharing, and collaborating. She celebrates being able to motivate families to invest quality time with their children. Irischa M. Valentin is a Boston educator and a proud graduate of Boston Public Schools. Her teaching career has been spent supporting and working with multilingual scholars. She completed her teaching studies through the Boston Teacher Residency program. She is also a community herbalist and healing justice organizer based in the Wampanoag/Massachusetts territory. When not teaching young people, she often dances, travels, spends time with her family in Boston and Puerto Rico, gardens in her small but abundant urban garden, makes herbal medicine, and organizes healing workshops. A student from Margarita Muniz Academy, Boston Public Schools.
Panelists will discuss:
- Understanding the current Massachusetts political and policy landscape for multilingual learners (MLL) and the resulting challenges facing them
- Learning about effective programming for MLLs that uphold their native languages and cultures while learning academics and English
- The challenges of (re)building a robust bilingual educator pipeline and promising practices.
