This comes from The Daily News by way of a member of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Transition Team.
“Teachers
and administrators have been maligned,” she said. She vowed to
reinstitute professional development and training of teachers, but to do
so from within the school system itself.
She repeatedly stressed the need to treat parents as partners.
“She
actually sees parents as allies in making the schools better, not as a
nuisance to be kept out,” said Javier Valdes, executive director of Make
the Road New York, a Brooklyn community group that hailed her
appointment.
But the emotional high point of FariƱa’s remarks came when she talked of
entering city public schools speaking only Spanish, and of facing
discrimination from a teacher who refused to learn to pronounce her
name.
With
Latinos now making up more than 40% of our school population, thousands
of pupils from Latin America and other parts of the world continue to
face the same kind of problem today, FariƱa said. Too often, teachers
pressure those children to
Anglicize their names.
“Your children will be spoken to by the name you gave them,” the new chancellor promised.
Only a lifetime educator could grasp the importance of properly pronouncing every child’s name in the classroom.
Editors Note
As a member of the Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council when Ms. Farina was promoted to Deputy Chancellor, I beg to differ with the above comments and article. Citywide parent leaders found Deputy Chancellor Farina to be just like Chancellor Joel Klein when it came to parent concerns. The only reason I can find for her appointment as chancellor is her history with Community School Board 15 member and now Mayor Bill de Blasio.
