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Newark Latino families and labor organizers are asking the school district to require professional interpreters at every board meeting after they say Spanish-speaking parents’ public comments were incompletely interpreted at a recent meeting.
Rafael Chavez, a community organizer with the New Labor advocacy organization, said in the absence of a qualified interpreter at last month’s school board meeting, superintendent Roger León stepped in to interpret some parents’ public comments. Chavez told Chalkbeat the issue of interpretation has come up repeatedly at previous Newark board meetings, including at the September meeting where he testified in Spanish without an interpreter.
According to Chavez, León omitted portions of parents’ statements that Chavez said criticized how they and their children have been treated in district schools.
In a review of the board video, Newark parents Sonia Pangul, Mayra Sanmartin, and Brenda Villatoro Villela can be heard testifying in Spanish about concerns regarding their children’s treatment in district schools and the lack of availability of music, sports, and art programs. León summarized those parents’ testimony in English and highlighted the positive aspects of their statements, but did not provide a direct word-for-word translation. For example, Sanmartin testified that district schools should have more social workers and asked León if he would craft a plan and find the funding to address that need, but the superintendent did not directly translate Sanmartin’s full request.
“If parents’ concerns were selectively left out, that is not interpretation. It is censorship,” Chavez said in a statement. “The superintendent cannot be both the subject of parents’ complaints and the person deciding which parts of those complaints the Board gets to hear. That is a clear conflict of interest and a fundamental breach of trust.”
A school district representative declined to comment on the allegations Wednesday, saying in an email that the district was closed in observance of Veterans Day.
Newark is home to thousands of non-native English speakers, and the school district is no stranger to complaints about the services it provides to multilingual learners.
In 2025, the Trump administration quietly ended its monitoring of the district’s English language learner program after the Department of Justice previously found that the district did not consistently use qualified interpreters for non-English speaking parents.
New Jersey law and federal civil rights requirements mandate that school districts must provide adequate language services to parents with limited English proficiency, but those policies pertain to accessing vital school information in order to participate in their child’s education. Those policies do not require school boards or districts to provide interpreters for public comment at meetings.
Other districts across the country do have policies in place that provide interpretation services for people speaking at board meetings. School districts in Chicago, Houston, and Tulsa all have policies to that effect.
Spanish-speaking families and advocates intend to hold a rally Wednesday evening at 6:30 p.m. outside of the New Labor group’s Newark location at 7 Wilson Ave to demand that the Newark school board employ qualified interpreters at every meeting and adopt a policy that would prohibit district leadership from serving as interpreters when parents are highlighting concerns about district operations.
Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.
