FORT COLLINS, Colo. – Nearly 3,000 students in Colorado’s Poudre School District have native languages other than English, and about 71 percent of them need extra help to overcome the language barrier.

In total, the district’s English Language Learners speak more than 60 different languages, a situation that forces the district to employ 22 family liaisons to communicate with parents, two who speak Arabic and 20 who speak Spanish, the Coloradoan reports.

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District officials also contracts with translators for other languages as needed, including Vietnamese, Korean and Mandarin.

PSD Family Engagement Specialist Claudia Menendez told the Coloradoan she sees her role in coordinating the family liaisons as a community service to help students and parents who can’t speak interest find food assistance and other government resources.

“They live with a lot of fear, especially if they’re here undocumented,” Menendez said. “They tend to be a little bit segregated. They don’t know which doors to knock on because they come from a very different education system.”

In many cases, parents have immigrated to the United States but never learned English. Their children, meanwhile, speak mostly English at school and quickly adapt to the language, which also creates problems at home, she said.

“Sometimes there’s that huge barrier between (parents and) the kids, too,” Menendez said. “If the kids speak more English than the parents, they could choose not to share everything (from school) with their parents.”

Hennd Mohamed, a sophomore Fossil Ridge High School, told the Coloradoan he picked up English quickly, but his mother, Amel Elshiekh, still speaks mostly Arabic at home.

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“It feels like my first language, even though it’s not,” Mohamed said of English. “Arabic is a difficult language and I don’t use it a lot, so it’s a bit harder for me to speak. I’m not a big fan of it.”

Like many foreign parents in Fort Collins, Elshiekh takes English language classes at the Front Range Center for Adult Learning at Fort Range Community College. She learned British English in Sudan, and is improving on her American English, but still struggles to communicate with her children.

“I can express myself and what I need in Arabic best,” she said. “When I try to do this with my kids, they just say, ‘What is she saying?’ That’s my struggle. That’s made it hard for me and them, too,” Elshiekh said.

And while Elshiekh is working to improve her English, she wants her children to improve their Arabic skills, as well. Her two youngest children attend Sunday school at the Islamic Center in Fort Collins as an opportunity to embrace their religion, culture, and native Arabic one a week.

“Everything in our religion is all in Arabic,” she said. “I want them, when they grow up, to learn more about Islam in Arabic – in it’s own language, not English.”

In total, the Poudre School District educated 23,298 students who speak English, 2,113 who speak Spanish, 158 who speak Arabic, 140 who speak Mandarin, as well as groups of at least 16 students who speak Korean, German, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, French, Telugo, and Russian.