by Raul A. Pinto (@RaulAPinto) in Mississauga, under the NCM Mentoring Program
Not long after I landed in Canada
from Chile in 2010, I met a young man through some mutual friends. He
was a high school dropout, and his reasons were pretty simple: he wasn’t
a good student, and he didn’t know what to take after graduation, so he
preferred to work.
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In Chile, student protests have led
to an education reform that has helped improve graduation rates. In
Canada, Latin American students have experienced higher than average
dropout rates.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Creative Commons |
What Parents Say
Gustavo Rizzo, an Argentinean
Pentecostal minister, has been living and working in Spanish-Canadian
churches for 12 years since he, his wife and three children emigrated
here. Rizzo says it is extremely hard to tutor your children when you
are not originally from Canada.
“I think about three things,” he
says. “First is the language barrier, because we need to communicate
with our kids’ teachers; second, the educational system, which is
completely a different thing than the one my wife and I had; and third,
as a consequence of the second, the difficulties we have for helping our
kids.”
Colombian natives Guido and Rossy,
who prefer only their first names be published, are parents of three
daughters, and their experience sending the eldest to first grade was a
rude awakening to the Canadian educational system.
“We had been living in Canada a few
years… By that time, we already managed the language pretty well. But
the educational system was way different than the one we had back home,”
explains Guido. “In kindergarten, they told us that before first grade,
playtime was the major objective. And when she started first grade the
school wanted her to already know some basic things about reading. Every
time I had asked previously, I was repeatedly told that daycare and
kindergarten were meant to be for playtime. And after a couple of months
in first grade they said our daughter was behind in her reading. Nobody
paid attention to us when we said what happened in kindergarten. We
understood then that in this culture the schools expect us to do the
biggest part in teaching our kids to read instead of just helping. For
me the idea is that schools here aid and reinforce the education they
(the children) receive from home.”
What Experts Say
“Involving parents in their
children’s education, which is key to educational success, cannot be
done only because there’s a regulation,” Bascuñan says. “It’s necessary
to develop a number of different initiatives. Back in the day, before
the amalgamation, we had funding enough to make monthly meetings with
parents, when we had trained child care workers to take care of the kids
while the parents were there, we had interpreters for all the different
languages, and we had dinner for everyone, solving the biggest problems
parents use as an excuse for not going.”
The problems for Guido and Rossy’s
daughter got worse with pressure from the school, with calls and letters
telling them how behind their daughter was. “Some teachers suggested
maybe our daughter had listening or speech problems, or having some
family issues at home,” Guido shares.
“As soon as the problems arose we
started helping her every night after school until today,” Guido
continues. “They’re nice at schools, very polite, but I think they try
to evade being blamed for any problem that my daughter had. It’s true,
at my house we try to only speak Spanish, but she speaks English too…
she could talk in both languages with no problem. Even so, once a
teacher told me to put her in ESL classes. And every time you asked for
help they give you a long list of websites instead of talking to you any
longer. We took her to all the doctors they sent us, and when we
realized she didn’t have any medical problem, her teachers changed the
nature of the issue over and over.”
Esther Contreras (who requested her
name be changed) knows the problem first-hand. Born in Canada with
Spanish parents, she is a teacher at the Peel District School Board
(PDSB).
“I
think parents that came from other countries are really concerned of
their kids’ education. In fact, a better education was one of the main
reasons why they immigrated here in the first place,” she explains.
Contreras
can speak with Spanish parents in their mother tongue, but for parents,
who speak other foreign languages, interpreters must be requested — the
school must “make an appointment, and wait until the PDSB’s office
sends somebody.”
Tackling the Problem
The local government has taken steps to address the situation. Some programs in Toronto are including Spanish teachers in their after-school homework clubs, and as Bascuñan says, “even when TDSB is still running behind, it has improved in the last years.”
However, Contreras
says it is necessary to find a way to have more workshops. “I don’t
think teachers here are educated enough about newcomers’ issues and the
impact that immigration really has on the students.”
Of course, since then, Guido and
Rossy have taken a different approach with their other two girls,
teaching them the alphabet and some basic words early on. “And it
worked,” says Guido. “My second daughter is in first grade and she is
reading well already.”
And the oldest one? “In second
grade they started teaching her math, and since she ‘couldn’t read,’
learning math was difficult, but not anymore. She’s in fifth grade and
she is finally catching up now.”
(this story was originally published on New Canadian Media on March 12, 2015. Link: http://bit.ly/1hrSmem)
