Effort to send multi-lingual letters heads toward success

The United Minorities Council effort to send home official Penn documents in students' native languages is moving forward with help from the financial aid office. The office has been talking with the UMC about offering forms in Spanish, as well as English. It will likely begin next semester, pending further discussion with the UMC. "At this point, we have talked to Jerome Byam from UMC, and we want to be responsive," said Bill Schilling, senior director of Student Financial Services. And Byam, the UMC chairman, said he wanted to see this happen for next semester. "We should be able to do it [for this spring]," he said. The project has been a UMC focus for the year and is very much the brainchild of Byam, who ran for his current position on the issue. "It started as a general idea to translate the documents the University sends out," Byam said. Last semester, the UMC said it wanted documents translated into several languages, including Spanish. The group originally targeted the Admissions Office as a key source of mail home. But their work with that office has been slow. The UMC said the delays have been in part because they had difficulty providing all data -- including financial figures and language information -- on the necessity of the program. The Office of Admissions did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the matter. So it appears that Financial Aid will be the pilot office for this program. Though Byam had suggested experimenting with Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish, it was decided that it would be best to try Spanish first. As with any new program, the University was apprehensive about the expense, and Byam admits that there are many financial factors involved, but he couldn't give an exact estimate. "There are a lot of hidden costs, but no, it's not [that expensive]," Byam said. However, Schilling said more facts are still needed before the program can begin. "Right now, we have no information on the languages spoken in the home," he said. But Schilling said the program is necessary if numbers show that a significant number of students have parents who can't read the letters from the University. "I think certainly that if there is an issue with parents not being able to understand the language [of the forms], we should try to accommodate them somehow," Schilling said. Byam says that not being able to read the letters is definitely a problem since "a substantial portion of the minority students here are first generation."