Communication

and

Connection

By Marie Kressin Last Updated:

According to the National Education Association, one in four K-12 students in the U.S. will be classified as an English language learner by 2025. Though we may often talk about families as if they’re one homogenous audience, that simply isn’t the case. In reality, every family in your district comes from a different background and has different needs. 

Supporting all families means adopting equitable best practices for communication. And according to Marifer Sager of Oregon’s Multnomah Education Service District (MESD), equitable communication is absolutely essential for districts hoping to connect meaningfully with their families.

Before moving into her current role as director of strategic communications and public affairs, Sager worked for Portland Public Schools (PPS) as the director of communications and language access. Now, at MESD, she spearheads the development of multilingual communications, outreach and engagement strategies. Sager is also an international speaker on topics such as language access, plain language, multicultural affairs and multilingual communications best practices. She holds a law degree from the Universidad de la Sierra and a brand management certificate from the University of London. 

In a conversation with SchoolCEO, Sager shares what language access looks like in action and how overcoming communication barriers is crucial to your district’s success.

Why are you passionate about language access in school communications?

 My commitment to school communications comes from a deep understanding of what it feels like when people cannot communicate. I’m an immigrant, and I’ve had the experience of living in two countries where I didn’t speak the language. I know what it feels like to see everybody talking about you without you. But when families realize that someone in administration understands them—when they receive communications from the district in their own language—they get this look on their faces that says, Oh! Finally, I know what this is about! 

School communicators are the liaisons between the district and families. It’s our job to have conversations with families and be aware of the current circumstances in the community so that we can provide the information they need.

What kinds of communication barriers might families face?

I would definitely say that elevated language can be a barrier, especially in written communications. If your doctor only speaks to you using medical jargon and fancy words, you’re going to feel left out. It’s the same in education. I will also say that if a district is only sending out information in English, that will also be a barrier for non-native speakers. 

At MESD, we have a lot of migrant families. Many of those parents cannot leave work just to come meet with their child’s teacher for 30 minutes because that will mean a loss of wages. So that’s an economic barrier. 

And when you think about all the immigrants and refugees that come to our schools from all over the world, you have to remember that in many places, school—if it exists—is very different from what Americans experience. For example, in some places, the teacher or principal is seen as an absolute authority—not just in the school, but in the community as well. Sometimes teachers will tell me things like, ‘I have a family from a different country, and they just don’t ask questions.’ Well, in some countries, you cannot question authority figures. 

When we talk about families, we have to remember they aren’t all the same. I’m Latino, but I wouldn’t claim to represent all Latinos. It’s very nuanced. Understanding that nuance and trying to not take offense when there are barriers to communication is important. Every family comes from a different context.

How might those different contexts cause families to misinterpret district communications?

When I was at PPS, I wanted to learn about who we were communicating with and how we could best connect them to our resources. Our department had created a PDF of mental health resources to give to families—but some of those families didn’t have a printer or even a computer. Some didn’t know what a PDF was. Others were able to access the PDF, but they couldn’t understand what we were saying because the language was too elevated. Still others were offended because they thought we were telling them they had a mental illness. 

Once I had all that information, I brought it to my superintendent’s cabinet. I was able to use my research to show them who our families were, where they lived and what they did. I made recommendations and started a conversation about how we could best reach our families. 

How have you overcome these kinds of communication barriers?

Think of my example earlier about migrant families who were unable to come to school just for a short meeting. Even before COVID, I was working to figure out how PPS could provide remote interpretation for parents. That way, when parents had a 15-minute break at work, they could go to the back room, log on and meet with their child’s teacher remotely—even if they didn’t speak English. We were one of the first districts to provide those services virtually.

Then, when the schools closed and IEP meetings needed to continue, I already had contracts in place with interpreters, and I knew I could train my team quickly on how to host virtual IEP meetings. Now, post-pandemic, PPS still provides the option of remote translation for virtual meetings. Their interpreters call families and give instructions in their language for how to join and what to expect. That’s just one way of navigating around those economic and linguistic barriers. 

Another one of our strategies at PPS was to add different languages to our social media pages. Through research, I had determined that there were six dominant written languages used throughout our region: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, simplified Chinese, Somali and Russian. That’s true for PPS, and it’s true for MESD as well. Then if it was a big campaign—like registration opening again—we would post in all six languages so that everybody could understand it. Social media also allows you to make different selections on the backend so that you can send specific posts to only a certain segment of your audience. For example, only people in the area who have their Facebook profile set to Vietnamese would receive the visual we translated into Vietnamese.

We also hosted some events at PPS in other languages, just to change the dynamic. The meetings were led by administrators who spoke one of the district’s six dominant languages, and we brought in interpreters for English-speaking parents. It equalizes the room completely and highlights that piece about language access and language justice.

At MESD, one initiative I’m especially proud of is our new website. It’s multilingual, and the very first thing users see are our translation buttons. We also tried to write everything on the website in plain language, which, of course, always makes translation easier. These are the kinds of things school communicators can do to signal to all families that they matter. 

What is plain language, and why is it important?

Plain language—also called plain writing or plain English—is communication your audience can understand the first time they read or hear it. Basically, it means writing at a grade level no higher than eighth grade. Plain writing also means making your text easy to read visually—spacing out text, using bullet points—so that readers can easily find what they’re looking for. So that’s what plain language is: Simple language, simple terms. 

I’d only been working at PPS for a year when my interpreters started telling me about difficult meetings they’d had with parents and special education teachers. My interpreters were telling me, ‘I tried my best, but the parents still didn’t get it. They just couldn’t access it.’ And that was often the case, too, with parents who spoke fluent English. I couldn’t help but think, Why? Why do we keep doing this? 

One day, during one of those conversations, a colleague said that she would sometimes make drawings to help explain the special education process. And we thought, What if we did that and explained the process in plain language? And that’s what led to our Multilingual Special Education Family Toolkit, a set of cards that show the special education process, eligibility categories and placement options in PPS. The cards are available in PPS’s six supported languages, use universal graphics and are written in plain language. 

I remember one mother who spoke a Mayan language; the father spoke that language and Spanish. They’d been working with our team for maybe five years. When we first came up with the cards, the team laid the whole thing out for the mom and dad, saying, ‘Look, this is the process. We have done this. We have done that. We’re here, and this is what will happen in the future.’ They also explained the different key points of their child’s disability. The mother started crying. She finally got it. The parents had only been resistant because they hadn’t understood.

Why is language accessibility important?

 That is an excellent question that I’ve been asked multiple times. For one, because we receive federal funds, we have a legal mandate to support those who need meaningful communication in other languages. There are a number of federal laws and policies for language access in K-12, like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. There have also been key court decisions supporting language access, like Lau v. Nichols (1974) and Plyler v. Doe (1982). It would actually be a civil rights violation not to do this work. 

But really, for me, this work is more than a legal obligation. We do it because we are nice humans supporting other humans. Plain language and language access are, I believe, the pillars of equity and communications. 

While I was at PPS, we decided to host a family engagement event in all six of our dominant languages. We started with a multilingual slideshow. The welcome session was in English with interpreters available, but then we moved into breakout sessions hosted by district personnel, each of whom were fluent in one of the six languages. 

That event was a lot of work to organize. It wasn’t as easy as just having one meeting in English. But that’s what accessibility means. It’s not easy, and it’s often uncomfortable—but you do it because you know it’s the right thing.