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Program brings more foreign-born guidance counselors into schools

By Scott Travis
Education Writer

January 27, 2006


It's a tough task for immigrant children to attend school in a new country, but Yvette Urbina is trying to make the transition a little easier.

She works at Coral Sunset Elementary School, west of Boca Raton, which she said has about 250 students with limited English skills. Urbina is an immigrant, having spent most of her life in Colombia. Now, she is one of 53 bilingual, bicultural guidance counselors in Palm Beach County, according to school district records.

The school district pays teachers to get their guidance counseling master's degree at Florida Atlantic University, and the teachers work alongside a certified guidance counselor while they are being trained.

These guidance counselors often work in small groups with students in the English for Speakers of Other Languages, or ESOL, program. They help them adjust academically and socially and help them decide what classes they should take. They also spend a lot of time helping parents and explaining how they can assist their children with their education.

Urbina works largely with children from Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries.

"Children come here and don't know how things work," she said. "The discipline is different, the rules are different. The grading system can be different. They're learning a second language."

The guidance counselor program was started four years ago, after the Department of Education cited the school district in 2000 for failing to adequately serve the needs of children with limited English skills. At that time, the district had one guidance counselor out of more than 250 who wasn't from the United States, according to school district records and Steve Byrne, assistant director of multicultural education.

Students with limited English skills often were discouraged from taking rigorous classes or applying for popular magnet programs, such as Bak Middle School of the Arts and Dreyfoos School of the Arts, both in West Palm Beach, said Nuncia Lowery, a multicultural manager with the school district.

"There weren't enough guidance counselors who could identify the students' talents from their cultural standpoints," she said.

So, the district formed a partnership with FAU, which modified its guidance counselor master's program to include special training in dealing with children from different backgrounds. The district received a $360,000 federal grant to start the program.

Few, if any, places in the United States have similar programs, said Alex Miranda, associate professor of counseling education at FAU.

The program is available only to educators who spent a significant part of their life in a Spanish-, Creole- or Portuguese-speaking country. These are the three most common languages spoken by immigrant children in Palm Beach County. In the district's ESOL program, 10,000 students speak Spanish, 5,500 speak Haitian Creole and 1,000 speak Portuguese, Byrne said.

"One of the questions we ask when we interview them is to describe their immigrant experience. We're looking for someone who was born and raised in another country," Lowery said. "Kids don't have a choice in immigrating to the United States. Their parents make those decisions. We want a person who can identify with them and help them assimilate, in addition to assisting in translation."

Scott Travis can be reached at stravis@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6637.