Translation & Interpretation

The Office of Translation & Interpretation

The Buffalo Public Schools is the most linguistically diverse district in the State of New York!  There are 82 different languages spoken by BPS students.  Spanish, Arabic, Karen, Somali, Burmese, Swahili, and Bengali are the seven most common languages spoken by our English language learners.  The top seven languages represent 80% of total ELL population.

Link to the form: TranslationRequest - PowerApps

The Language Access Plan is put in place to assist schools in communicating with their non-English speaking parents in their preferred language in order to support shared parent-school accountability, parent access to information about their children’s educational options and parents’ capacity to improve their children’s achievement.

In addition to translating District documents, the District has contracts with outside vendors in order to meet the needs of families that speak low incident languages and/or prefer a different mode of communication. Furthermore, BPS hired 6 Cultural Resource Specialists that represent the Districts top languages to serve as a support to our newly arrived and/or non-English speaking families. The Cultural Resource Specialists are located at the District’s Central Registration Welcome Center from 8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. (33 Ash Street) or contacting them by phone at 716.816.3717.

The Division of Multilingual Education in collaboration with District and community partners have developed several resources that we believe families and school staff will find valuable:  Parent Engagement Handbook, Language Access Binder, Multilingual Ecology, and Cultural Awareness Guide.

Translated Documents