Parents want more bilingual counselors

Some improvements are needed, however: The school system needs more guidance counselors.

‘‘I think that our school counselors have a lot of work and are not able to meet with the 11th- and 12th-graders enough to inform them about colleges and the whole college admission process,” Diaz, a native of Nicaragua, told the school board during the forum Thursday. ‘‘This is a very scary process, especially if you are the first one going to college in your family.”

On Monday night, the school board discussed the role of guidance counselors.

There are 459 counselors in the county’s school system, according to a Monday memo from schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast.

Diaz, whose mother speaks only Spanish, said there is no Spanish-speaking counselor in her school.

The school system has seven Spanish-speaking ESOL counselors at high schools with the highest number of ESOL students. Also, there are 46 pupil personnel workers and 66 school psychologists, school officials said.

At the elementary school level, one guidance counselor is responsible for 431 students on average. In middle school, one counselor is responsible for 200 students. In high school, one is responsible for 227 students.

The school system’s Office of School Performance assigns guidance counselors, who are supervised and evaluated by principals, according to MCPS.

There’s another concern, said Diaz and Rita Lewi, executive director of the Chinese Culture and Community Service Center: a lack of bicultural counselors.

‘‘Their presence at our schools is essential to ensuring the well-being of our Asian-American students,” Lewi told the school board during the community forum. ‘‘Our biggest problem is that we don’t have enough bicultural Asian-American counselors in schools with a large Asian population. Outside of the ESOL⁄bilingual programs, our school system has not adequately addressed the counseling needs of our Asian-American students.”

Jane de Winter, president of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, agreed.

‘‘When parents who do not speak English or who face other cultural barriers seek to take this newly developed desire for involvement to their local schools, this desire runs into a brick wall when staff does not speak their language or is not culturally competent,” she told the school board on Monday night.

‘‘The changing demographics of the school system require staff to be culturally competent, agile, and strategic in the ways they engage students and their families,” Weast wrote in the memo. ‘‘The school system will continue to look for ways to build strong partnerships with parents and the community, and provide families with the resources they require to prepare their children for success in school and in life.”

During Monday night’s discussion, school board members and administrators talked about the counselors’ heavy workloads, especially at the high school level, where they are responsible for college applications and recommendations.

‘‘They need more assistance from us, they need more tools,” said Aggie Alvez, the school system’s director of communications. ‘‘Our job is to get them those tools.”

‘‘This has been an area of great interest to me and everyone up here,” said school board President Nancy Navarro (Dist. 5) of Silver Spring. ‘‘We have to evolve as the demographic changes.”