Students strike for equity at 2

Parent-teacher conferences are getting lost in translation.

Dropped calls, poor connections and long waits have turned the crucial sitdowns into a nightmare for city teachers who rely on the phone translation system to communicate with non-English-speaking families, according to multiple Education Department sources who spoke to the Daily News on the condition of anonymity.

“It’s a hot mess,” said one Brooklyn teacher of English as a Second Language who was counting on the service to talk with Mandarin- and Spanishspeaking parents at conferences last week.

While waiting almost 20 minutes on the phone for a Mandarin interpreter, the teacher was forced to get creative with waiting parents, who were allotted only 10 minutes each and scheduled back-to-back.

“I had to use Google translator,” the teacher said. “It’s just awkward when I’m trying to provide something professional in a professional setting.”

The city’s Education Department provides the phone service, operated by outside contractor Linguistica International, for school staff who need to speak with parents with limited English when there’s no in-house translator.

Educators are supposed to be able to dial a central number, request a language for translation, and get patched in with a certified interpreter. An estimated 40% of the city’s 1 million students come from homes where English is not the primary language.

But educators described a system unprepared for the volume of phone calls that poured in during parent conferences last week, the most crucial stretch of the year for schoolfamily communication.

In one instance, a Brooklyn special education teacher dialed multiple times during parentteacher conferences only to have it ring out. The teacher was forced to ask staff from the afterschool program to translate for Spanish-speaking families.

In another, a school psychologist in Brooklyn who uses the phone translation service to explain accommodations for students with disabilities said one conference got mired in technical difficulties.

“It’s constantly dropping calls,” the psychologist said. During the meeting, the connection cut out three times, and each time, the psychologist had to call back and request a new translator all over again. Ultimately, the psychologist tracked down a bilingual staff member to step in.

Education Department staffers say they shouldn’t have to rely on generous colleagues, volunteers or translation workarounds to give crucial information to families.

“I cannot do my job,” said the psychologist. “When my guidance counselor has to translate for me, it means she can’t teach her kids.”

Teachers say it wasn’t always this way. The Education Department switched vendors this year after the contract for Language Line, the previous vendor, expired.

“We didn’t have any problems with them,” said the Brooklyn school psychologist.

The new deal appears to come with a cheaper price tag. City records show the Education Department signed a threeyear, $2.75 million contract with Language Line, the old vendor, while it plans to pay Linguistica Inernational about that amount over five years.

Education Department officials did not respond to questions about the comparative costs of the services.

Dozens of students at two Manhattan high schools separated by a staircase — and a glaring racial and economic gap walked out Monday in the first of a planned series of weekly protests against the inequity.

The demonstrators who attend NYC iSchool and Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, which share a SoHo building, say they want a fix for the segregation that’s become endemic in city high schools.

“It is clear to see the inequities between our schools that are separated by a staircase,” said Carla Gaveglia, a senior at NYC iSchool, an academically selective program with a 41% black and Hispanic racial mix.

At in-house neighbor Chelsea CTE, 81% of the students are black and Hispanic — and it has more than double the proportion of kids who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

“You can tell who goes to iSchool, who goes to Chelsea,” said Alex Ruiz, a senior at Chelsea CTE, noting that kids enter through different doors and steer clear of each other aside from shared sports teams.

“It’s an extremely diverse campus, but you can definitely see something’s rather off when it comes to demographics.”

But Ruiz, who aspires to be a public defender, got an occasional peek at the wealth of academic resources available at his in-house neighbor. In ninth grade, an iSchool science class invited students from Chelsea to participate in an experiment where students tested gravitational force with marbles and magnets.

“It was a really cool experiment,” Ruiz said. But the fact that “they even had the opportunity to conduct something like that, me looking at my science class, that didn’t seem feasible at all because we were so focused on the curriculum.”

The disparities only widened as college approached. Ruiz said he watched iSchool kids celebrate acceptances to prestigious private