journal 6

Today was a long and tricky day. I walked into my school to be informed that Carina my culture coordinator is out and will not be in at all today. Carina left me a note with a list of to dos, it is everythingI usually do plus signing up people for an event the school was doing. That day the secretaries gave me a key to her office to take over for the day. I was fine with this because I practically wouldn’t see Carina till my last out at the school. I started working on the lesson plan I had written up for my youth pride club and kept getting interrupted by students knocking on the door looking for Carina.  Each time I opened the door I was bombarded with students. They would directly sit down and wait for Carina, while ignoring every word I said. I realized they were ignoring me because they preferred speaking in Spanish and being spoken in Spanish. It took me a while but I asked them what they needed, Que necesitas¿ and the student wouldn’t give me much detail be just that they almost fought Someone in their classroom. And the teacher had sent them to the main office but instead they walked into Carina’s office trying to get out of trouble and trying to find some comfort, because they almost fought a guy bullying him for speaking mainly Spanish. This kept happening throughout the day. We needed more people to translate on that Friday in three parts of that school. Daddy I realize that the culture coordinator is the sole purpose the school continues to do as well as they could. These kids need more advocates in their school and lives. They cannot depend on one single person or weekly volunteers as they do. If the other volunteers are not in or Carina is not in, the school sees a huge problem in managing alone. The main office has 15 students sitting on the benches, waiting for the Dean of students, Vice Principal, or the principal of the school to explain what happened. If more than 50% of the school is Hispanic and majority of those students in that office are Hispanic who need a translator during this process and they don’t have that because there’s not enough volunteers, that is NOT the real issue. The main issue is that the school really needs a permanent translator or need to hire more people that have a Spanish-speaking education.Doesn’t have to be with only Spanish speaking this also has to be a requirement for people to get jobs trying to advocate for all of the students. Even the students that have a bad background, and whose parents don’t know how to improve their lives. THIS WAS MESSY.