Language Access Planning

In 2024 - 2025, the Gentzler Translation Center and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) collaborated to design the Language Access Planning Institute which provided 18 months of training on the creation of language access plans to teams from the following public schools: Barnstable, Quincy, Revere, and Salem. The institute combined presentations and conversations with task-oriented workshops and district-specific coaching sessions. At the end of the institute each district had a strong draft and presentation of their language access plan. We created this eight-part video series to encourage more districts to create their own language access plans.

Related resources mentioned in the videos include: 

DESE Language Access Services for Families website

Self-Assessment Form for School Districts

Video 1: Introduction to Language Access Planning for School Districts

This video provides an introduction to language access planning for school districts to promote the continuous improvement of language access and services and supports in schools.

Video 2: Assembling a Language Access Planning Team

This video describes how school districts may take a collaborative approach to language access planning by creating a districtwide language access planning team.

Video 3: Framing a Districtwide Language Access Plan

This video describes how a district's language access planning team can frame the language access plan to make the document meaningful and useful to a wide range of district stakeholders.

Video 4: Identifying Family Language Access Needs

This video describes the language access plan template’s first building block, which is dedicated to identifying language access needs.

Video 5: Providing Language Access Services and Supports

This video describes the language access plan template’s second building block, which defines the scope of the district’s language access services and supports.

Video 6: Promoting Language Access

This video describes the third building block of the language access plan template, which covers communication strategies for building awareness of the language access system.

Video 7: Training Providers and Users of Language Access Services

This video describes the fourth building block of the language access plan template that addresses the training need of providers and users of the language access system.

Video 8: Monitoring the Quality of Language Access Services

This video describes the fifth building block of the language access plan template that addresses the need to monitor service quality to support continuous improvement of the language access system.

In celebration of the conclusion of the 2024 - 2025 Language Access Planning Institute, we created a poster inspired by the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone, a famous artifact displayed in the British Museum, is a broken part of a larger stone slab, copies of which were placed in every temple in Egypt. These slabs all had the same official message stating that the priests supported the king, Ptolemy V (r. 204 - 181 BCE), carved into them in three types of writing: hieroglyphs (suitable for this type of decree), Demotic (language of the people), and Ancient Greek (language of the administration). When the Rosetta Stone was found in the late 18th century, no one knew how to read hieroglyphs, but scholars did know how to read Ancient Greek. Thus, they used their language knowledge to decipher the hieroglyphs which had gone out of use by the end of the 4th century CE. The Rosetta Stone serves as an inspiration for the work of language access because it speaks to the value of multilingual documents and language learning for humanity.

See and download the full poster or write to [email protected] to request a print copy. See and download the full poster or write to [email protected] to request a print copy.