Cafeteria supervisor, Google Translate manage to allay hungry student’s worries
PITTSBURGH — Children can be notoriously picky about school lunches. No surprise, then, that Yvonne Weber has encountered more than a few fussy eaters in the two decades she’s worked in Baldwin-Whitehall’s elementary school cafeterias, 11 of them as a manager.
Yet the little boy standing so unhappily in the cafeteria line one day last fall at Harrison Education Center was another case entirely.
Try as she and others might, no amount of cajoling could persuade the child, a recent immigrant from Turkey who knew no English, to put a single item on his tray save for a bottle of water.
He didn’t hate the food per se, said Weber, who started as a substitute lunch lady in 2004 and now oversees more than 1,000 students each day at the new R. A. Lutz Elementary. He simply didn’t understand a typical American elementary school menu of chicken fingers, walking tacos and cheese pizza.
“He had no idea what our food was,” recalls Weber. “Nobody could communicate with him about what he wanted to eat.”
While he would have happily settled for a bag of chips, he didn’t yet have money in his account to pay for it. Eventually, he accepted a handout package of chocolate teddy bear crackers to quell his hunger.
It took a few days before Weber realized the solution was as easy as reaching into her pocket for her cell phone, where the personal translator on the app Google Translate awaited her anxious fingers.
With students from all corners of the globe, Baldwin-Whitehall is one of the region’s most culturally diverse school districts outside of Pittsburgh Public Schools. Increasingly, teachers have turned to technology to provide immigrant children and their families with the tools and resources they need to succeed in their new community.
In the district, about 500 children are classified as English Language Learners, meaning they either have minimal English skills, or in the case of the Turkish student, don’t speak any English at all.
“We have students coming in speaking about 25 different languages.” said Kara Eckert, director of instruction and learning for grades 1-5. They speak everything from Nepali and Ukrainian to Burmese, Arabic and Dinka, the official spoken language of South Sudan.