 We are looping back now to cultural liaisons. I think I've told everyone, I do these little French exercises that Le Mans sends me every morning. I probably told you 10 million times. And so, to practice a little Francais, as I say liaison. Abir, I know she is here. I am here, yes. Hi, how are you? I'm good, how are you? I'm doing well, thanks. Abir, how do you pronounce your last name? Elzebadi. Elzebadi. Well, Ms. Elzebadi, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. I know that some committee members had the opportunity to visit Winooski the school last year, where you work. We've heard great things. And what, as I mentioned to you on the phone, we're looking at expanding cultural liaisons throughout the state. And we thought it important. We've heard again from a number of people in your district how well things are going. But we thought it very important to hear from somebody who's really on the ground and actually doing the work. So if you don't mind, I thought we might just take a minute and introduce ourselves. So you know us and also where we're all from because you do have a couple of your senators are on this call. And then we'll hear from you. So I'm Brian Campion. I represent Bennington County in Wilmington. And to my right is Senator Lyons. How are you? It's nice to have you here. I'm Senator Ginny Lyons. I am your senator for Chittenden County. And I have been to Winooski schools many times and have high regard for the work that's going on there. Terrific. Senator Perslick. Thank you. Senator Perslick, I represent Washington County and I was the only member of the committee this year that was on the committee last year. And I did go up and do the tour and visit. We've met with a whole group of the cultural liaison when I was there. Well said. Before you, I don't know if you heard our conversation. I've been working on my French. So that's why committee members are giving me a hard time. Senator Hooker, please. Hi, Abir. I'm Sheryl Hooker. I'm from Rutland County and I've heard great things about Winooski and look forward sometime to visiting your schools. Senator Chittenden. Abir, I'm Thomas Chittenden. I also represent you in Chittenden County. So it's great to have you here today. Thank you for finding the time. Wonderful. So Ms. Alsabadi, just tell us a little bit about how, if you would, how you got into this kind of work and just a little bit about the work that you do. Hi, everyone. Good evening. I'm Abir Alsabadi, Arabic Home School Liaison at Winooski School District. It's my pleasure to be here with you and give you some information about my role in the school and my friend's role. I get to this job after I volunteered for one year with the Burlington High School, helping some ELL students with their classes voluntarily for three months and then continue back and forth with some other students. And then I applied for after the school program with a JJ Flynn School and I worked for a whole year there. And then when Winooski School have some opening for Arabic Liaison, they before have some liaison for Vietnamese and that you have for Somalis and Swahili but none for Arabic. And then when I have a new group of high school students struggling a lot with learning English and finding job and all of that. So they ask for Arabic Home School Liaison and then I applied with other colleagues and I get the job and I have been there since 2014. I worked through the district and then mid of the like 2016, they stop receiving any Arabic families or any Middle Eastern families. And then my work continue to help all ELL learner. It doesn't matter where they are from. And I'm really working on daily basis at ELL classrooms in middle school, high school, elementary, giving support to learn some English, some math, some science and doing some community projects, connect students to the school board, their families. This job and this rule is really, really wide. I cannot just describe it by one title or by one word or even sentences. We're going really above and beyond. It's the human needs. I feel always like words and sentences on title is not gonna really represent what I want to do or how can I help? It's exactly like in your household you have a lot of family members and all of them, they deserve help and they deserve to be well-served. If you aren't responsible, I cannot just serve some of the students and leave others. So the idea it's really wide and I want to help not just me, me and my team, they all love to help and that's what we're doing. Even if it's more than it's our rules or job rules. This job basically has no rules. That's what I want you to all to know. If you really put a rules for that job it's gonna be like a cage for us because we're community liaison and we are inside of the school. Yes, we're going to the classroom, we're working with the kids and then end of the day, we're contacting their families and talking to them and telling them where we need support, where we want you to be with us, where we can support you. And then the families start telling us what they need. So it's a family needs, the community needs. We're going to the public agency, we're going to the housing, we're going to the real estate people, we're going to the hospital to the doctors, we're going to the social security office. We are work is literally unlimited, unlimited and we can, we did try and do everything to help the families, the students, the teachers. Even presenting for the teachers, presenting for our culture, like what culture I'm representing, schools, teachers, the principals, super attendants, people in my town, they need to know about this culture. We did like some presentation for every new staff, for the support staff, for the teachers, for the school board, we're going for the city councilor and give them some presentation about our cultures. What is the difference is how we make the gaps really small between our newcomer families. It's wide. It's really wide and I don't like to put it in a cage and say, oh, this is not my job. I'm not going to do this. Not me, not anyone in my team do that. So it sounds like it's, it is one of those jobs that you, you're everywhere, like you said, you're in the school and you're talking to parents about the child's school experience. You might be going to a doctor's office and it's following people and working with people regularly. Yes. Yes. And just so you know, we're just looking to expand this to give other towns and communities this possibility, but it is also helpful to understand how fluid and how much effort and work goes into it. Senator Hooker. Thank you, Senator Campion. This sounds like a vocation more than a job of your, and I'm curious to know how many cultural liaisons do you have at Winooski? I know we mentioned it before, but I've forgotten the number and how many students, families, I mean, you're serving all of the kids in the school. How big is the school? For the years and we have, we are six liaisons representing different language. Maybe nine or eight language is more than our number, because one or two of my friends, they talk more than one language. For the school, the percentage of the ELL students, it's more than 50% in the school. In general, the school has elementary, middle, high school, so it's around 800, 600, that number up and down sometimes, but most of them, they are newcomer families, or new American families, we call them. So it looks like it may be 100 to one students to... It depends on the community. Like for my community, as an Arabic community, I don't have more than like certain number of students in the school, and the families is not more than 30 families. Sometimes like beginning of the 2018-16, we reached 50 families, now it's less. Most of them, they leave Wineski, so the students leave Wineski. For the Bhutanese Nepalis, we have almost 200 students. For the Somalis, we have a big number of Somalis and Swahili's speaker. Now, recent year, this year and last year, we have a Congo families coming from Kenya and other African countries. Kind of, it depends on the year where we are. Sometimes we get a lot of people from Africa. Sometimes we get a lot from Asia, so it depends. But... But in fact, you're helping all of those students in the whole school. You're relating not only to your new coming families, but helping the families who have been here to relate to them as well. So it's a... Yes, we became a part of ELL classes, which is a new English learning classes. And these, excuse me, these classes teaching a newcomer students English. So they have zero English, some of them, some of them they have a medium English. Excuse me. But we become a part of the classroom. So we are daily routine in the classroom teaching math or English. And supporting students. I don't have any Arabic students in these classes, but I support all of them. Thank you. Senator Lyons. Thank you. I can't imagine the work that you're doing. It's just unbelievable. So just a couple of practical questions. How's it going during the Zoom process? Are you meeting in the school at all now? Or is it mostly through internet? Or how's that all happened? Yeah. For Winniski, we have some challenges. Do you need to get more water? I do have my water with me. Go ahead. Sorry. No problem. For our school, we have some challenges because you know how is the community and law and come families. We stopped mid-December until mid-June, January, sorry. Almost more than a month we stopped. It's all through Zoom. And then now we are back in school for the elementary four days a week. For the middle high school, it's hybrid, so two days by three days. And this is going like, right now we have a vacation, but like after vacation, it's we hoping to extend it to a full week for middle high school, but it's not happening right now. But in elementary, it's four days. Middle high school, two days by three days. Two days in school, three days Zoom. So that's difficult. I mean, especially for ELL students. ELL, it's just, yeah. And then the other question I have is, you know, so much of what is happening right now and linking people and connecting people with getting their vaccines and getting the food and getting the information that they need during the pandemic. Have you found that there is information that has been translated by the Department of Health or others that help you communicate some of the more critical information? Yes, we basically, last summer we didn't stop working. We worked through all the summer continuously. This is our first year. We didn't talk of the summer we work extra because of the need of the information need to be going to the families and to the doctors and cover all the families that they get COVID inside of the household and how we help them by phone and how the school help deliver the medicines and food and water to their doors. And we were in the middle of that connection, making a connection with the doctors and with the school nurses, with everyone, with the Vermont Department of Health and translating a lot of alerts messages, which is called the alert. We translate it, are recorded on our phone and send it to the district and the district send it to all families. This has to happen like within three hours or something is really fast. These times is all about how do you deliver the information quickly? And this is one of our way to deliver it very quickly to the families. So our director create the alert messages and send it to all liaison, translate it, record it and send it back to her and then they send it out to the families. Wow. And then we have some help from the Department of Health interpreter too. So we interpreter the beginning of the alert messages like families, be careful. This message is very important and coming to you from blah, blah, blah, we said it the beginning and then their translator, they translate the important information and attach it to our alert messages on going to the old Winniski families. It's a lot of work, but that's- It is a lot of work. It's just a detailed work. Yeah. Not everyone can do that. Thank you. I don't know if I could have persisted all through the summer like that. It's great. Well, it's all year around. Even now, right now in vacation and we every day like we have, they said, you're on vacation. This is up to you. Whatever you want to answer it, but the minute you open the email, you just feel like there is a tonsil fork what I'm gonna do just to close my eyes and not do it and then I look up. I don't like it this way. Yeah, I know. Join our club. We're in the same way. Yeah. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Any other questions? This has been incredibly helpful, very helpful. And we are all so grateful for your work and your commitment. Please know that as we continue our work on this and other issues, always feel free to reach out to us if there is something that, we're the education committee. So as you do your work in education and you see policies or ideas that you'd like to share, please feel free to write to our committee assistant. I know you have a email and share those ideas and we're happy to hear from you whenever you'd like. So again, we can't thank you enough for your work and we look forward to having more of you, if you will, throughout our state. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you. Thanks. Have a nice evening. Thanks you too. Thank you. That was great. Thank you.