Effingham Unit 40 is taking steps to better accommodate its students who are learning English as a second language.
The Effingham Unit 40 Board Monday unanimously approved the purchase of a multi-function copy machine that will allow the district to translate documents as the number of its students who speak a language other than English as a primary language continues to grow at a swift rate.
The copier will cost $12,795, and the district plans to cover this cost with Teacher Vacancy Grant funds.
The number of students in the district learning English as a second language has risen from between 70 and 75 last year to almost 130 now, according to Superintendent Andrew Johnson.
“I believe, if I’m not mistaken, we have seven or eight different languages that are being spoken,” Johnson said. “This is a copy machine that’s able to take anything in English, and we put it through. And we can dictate to the machine what translation we need. That would be housed in this district office.”
Johnson said the purchase of the copier is part of the district’s ongoing efforts to better communicate with both students learning English as a second language and their parents, something he admitted the district has been “struggling a little bit” with lately.
Before voting in favor of the purchase, Unit 40 Board member Desha Wear asked Johnson if the copier would be used exclusively for translating documents. Wear also, along with Unit 40 Board member Andrew Altman, discussed possible alternatives to the copier.
“There’s programs too, I’m sure, that you can scan stuff in, and it will spit it out in a different language, I’m assuming,” Wear said.
Effingham High School Principal Kurt Roberts told board members that while programs like those referenced by Wear and Altman exist, the copier will better serve the district’s needs.
“That’s great if these are electronic files, but if we’ve got copies of files, just paper files, that’s where this kind of device comes in handy,” Roberts said.
Roberts also said that keeping the copier at the district office would allow the district to improve its overall communication with students learning English as a second language and their families, rather than only improving the communication between these families and a single school in the district.
“Then I’m assuming that there are also discussions being made to have something at a building level to be able to do similar type things, I would think. Right?” Wear asked.
Johnson responded to Wear and told board members that he will work on gathering more information about the copier for them.
“There are discussions every day about what to do right now because we’re flying this plane from the backseat,” Johnson said. “Nobody really truly has a great answer in the education world to fix all that.”
Meanwhile, Johnson told board members that the district is also ordering devices that the district will use to translate audio for students learning English as a second language. He compared the device to Google Translate and said each of the 20 devices the district hopes to have by the end of the school year will cost $125.
“I quickly realized there’s difficulty with that, and, from my understanding, these devices do it at a much higher rate than Google Translate would do,” Johnson said.
The cost of these devices will be covered by the district’s grant funds, and Johnson said the district plans to purchase more of them once they become available.
Also during the meeting, the board voted unanimously to change the window of registration for district students to last from April 19 until April 30 for the 2024-25 school year. Unit 40 usually holds registration for students in July, but the district has been having trouble getting students from families that leave the country during the summer registered.
Johnson noted that there are about 130 students in the district who moved to the area from another country.
“There is a big tendency in the summer time. They’ll go back and are not around to help us be in the process of registering them for the next school year, so this will allow us, hopefully, to be able to get ahead of that just a bit,” he said.
Additionally, Johnson thinks that having registration at an earlier date than usual will give the district more time to prepare bus rosters for students.
“It will also help us from a transportation standpoint,” Johnson said. “Returning parents will register their students in the Campus parent portal. New families will use the new student registration link. Details can be found on our website, of course, at www.unit40.org,” Johnson said.