The New York City Department of Education has agreed to pay over $40,000 to settle a lawsuit filed in 2019 by Legal Services NYC that claimed the DOE did not provide sufficient language access services to four immigrant parents with limited English proficiency. Each of the four families involved in the case will receive $11,000 in damages as compensation for the harm caused by the DOE’s failure to provide adequate language services, announced by Legal Services Friday.
The lawsuit, brought on behalf of the four parents and the nonprofit community organization Alliance for Families with Developmental Needs (AFDN), alleged that the DOE repeatedly failed to provide translation and interpretation services, leaving parents unable to make informed decisions about their children’s education.
Under the settlement, the DOE has committed to a number of improvements. They agreed to enhance staff training for interpretation and translation services, update language access regulations to clarify parents’ rights, track translation requests and complaints, and improve communication on free language services.
“I am very grateful to the legal team. Although the litigation process was long, I was still very excited when I heard that a settlement was reached,” said Carrie Liu, a Mandarin-speaking plaintiff of a 14-year-old daughter with autism in Queens and member of AFDN.
The lawsuit accused the DOE of violating multiple laws, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits national origin discrimination by federally funded institutions. It also cited violations of the NYC Human Rights Law, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires schools to ensure that parents can participate in developing their child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP).
M’Ral Broodie-Stewart, senior staff attorney at Legal Services NYC, mentioned that while laws requiring the city’s public schools to provide language services to people who are Limited English Proficient (LEP) have existed for a long time, a lack of training has left many school staff unaware of the available resources when interacting with immigrant parents. “Unfortunately, it was a matter of lack of education among DOE staff,” she said. “The DOE has around 1,600 schools, and some were not up to par when it came to providing services that were readily available.”
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Sim Looi, the president of AFDN, said the settlement is a step toward ensuring that LEP parents have meaningful access to their children’s education and will benefit thousands of immigrant families in New York like plaintiff Liu and her daughter with autism. Currently, over 1.8 million residents in New York City are identified as LEP. In the 2023-24 school year, 16.3% of students were identified as LEP.
“As an immigrant mother from Malaysia, I faced the same struggles as Liu when I first moved to New York,” Looi said in Mandarin. She explained that AFDN was founded in spring 2016 by families caring for individuals with developmental disabilities, and that many of its over 700 members share the same challenges in communicating with schools because of language barriers. “Sometimes we feel embarrassed to go to school because we don’t understand what the teachers are saying and don’t know how to express our needs,” she added.
In Liu’s case, she recalled a distressing experience around 2018 when she received a phone call in English from her child’s bus driver, informing her that her daughter had suffered a seizure and was being taken to the hospital. Unable to fully understand the conversation, she could only recognize the hospital’s name but had no further details about her child’s condition.
In another instance, Liu’s daughter came home with bite marks on her body. After requesting an explanation in writing, she received a follow-up phone call — in English — which she struggled to comprehend.
Liu said that at the worst point, her child was sent to the emergency room twice in one month. “I was on edge every day, fearing something would happen to my child at school, but due to the language barrier, I couldn’t get any specific information from the school,” Liu said. “With translation services, I can quickly understand how to help my child learn and grow. If I can’t understand the documents and information sent by the school, how can I cooperate with the school?”
According to Legal Services NYC, another plaintiff, Marcela Hernandez, a Spanish-speaking mother of a 17-year-old student with autism, requested an interpreter for a school meeting. Instead of providing assistance, a staff member told her, “Why don’t you learn English?”
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Attorney Broodie-Stewart said all the plaintiffs are immigrant families with children in District 75, which serves children with significant disabilities. She pointed out that DOE’s failure to provide translation services created unnecessary barriers for families, leading to issues such as inability to understand changes in services, difficulty tracking academic progress, unawareness of rights and complications in special education.
Additionally, Broodie-Stewart noted that for LEP families, lack of language access makes IEPs become essentially one-sided contracts. “If the parent can’t read it, they don’t know what the school’s obligations are, and that’s a really difficult position to be in, because the law necessitates that parents have meaningful participation, and you can’t meaningfully participate without language access,” said Broodie-Stewart.
With the settlement reached, Broodie-Stewart and Looi hope the news will raise awareness among LEP parents about their rights to translation and interpretation services. “I hope they’ll be able to make that request [to lend translation and interpretation], and they shouldn’t be afraid to do so,” Looi said, noting that AFDN will host workshops to educate LEP parents about these rights.
For Liu, the victory made her feel empowered as an LEP parent and she encouraged parents facing similar difficulties to come forward to share their experiences and fight for systemic change.
“As minority groups, we must stand together and speak up so that others can understand our needs,” Liu said. “Although our children are a little different, they also deserve their rights and resources.”
