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| Buffalo Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Dr. Fatima Morrell and Lafayette High School Principal John Starkey |
By Franklin Hagler and Matthew Neidhart
Bengal News West Reporters
Try walking through the hallways at
Lafayette High School and finding the bathroom.
You don’t see the traditional sign
marking the room; it even lacks the symbol that would normally be seen as male
or female.
At Lafayette every room is labeled
with a sign that shows what that room is in six different languages. The
multi-linguistic paper signs can be deceiving in appearance.
“Half of our population is African,
from Central or East Africa, we have Arabic kids, a big population of the
Burmese speaking and Korean community. The other 50 percent are from Puerto
Rico and speak Spanish,” Lafayette Principal John Starkey said.
Buffalo is the most linguistically
diverse place in New York State according to Buffalo
Public Schools officials. Over 84 languages are represented in local
communities, and with the influx of refugees on the West Side that can grow.
This is causing a change in the way that teachers and the Department of
Education are approaching education and Lafayette High School
has become ground zero for this experiment.
Working with Dr. Fatima Morrell,
assistant superintendent for curriculum and Mrs. Nadia Nashir, assistant superintendent
for multilingual education, Principal Starkey has helped install changes in the
way teachers speak to students from different cultures, create a Parent Center
for everyone in the community and make tangible changes to the textbooks and
resources available to all students.
“Students learn better when they
see themselves and their history and culture represented in the curriculum,”
Dr. Morrell said. “We want to create a warm and welcoming environment for our
parents and students and make them feel appreciated.”
Lafayette High is not set up as a
traditional school, as there are three distinct schools housed in this one
building. Lafayette Proper School 204 has an 11th and 12th
grade class. “Phase-Out” is what it is being called as the junior class will be
the last set of students under that school.
Lafayette Phase-In School 207 is a
new program that was started by Starkey. This school has just a ninth grade,
100 of the new freshmen have been in the country for four years or less.
The last school is Newcomers
Academy that has grades 7-12 and nearly 300 students. This academy is mostly
made up of Students with Interrupted Formal Education or SIFE students.
“We have students coming from war
torn countries or impoverished conditions so they are coming with a lot of
socio-emotional needs and so we can’t just look at the academic support for
them but look at the comprehensive support for them,” Starkey said.
Eighty
percent of the students in Buffalo public schools come from poverty, which is why community schooling and building
relationships with the families has become so important.
“If we truly want to improve student
learning we have to improve adult learning, ” Mrs. Nashir said.
Her department has hired six cultural
research specialists that are holding workshops for teachers and parents. This
month they plan on training 150 teachers and by June they want all teachers to
be trained.
“In the
multilingual department we understand that many of our teachers have not had an
English language learner in front of them,” Nashir said. “ The ecology has to
speak to our students.”
