Report cards in your language

While Indian and Pakistani schools are moving to English report cards, in New York, it is your mother tongue that gets the honor.

City schoolchildren should be able to get report cards in one of eight foreign languages by this time next year, city educrats said yesterday at a City Council hearing.

The Education Department already translates many student records into Spanish, Chinese and Russian, the most common foreign languages in the city.

But with the city's immigrant population exploding - and a new $5.3 million translation unit within the Education Department - officials hope to add Bengali, Haitian Creole, Korean, Urdu and Arabic.

The hearing was on a separate Council bill that would vastly increase translation services in city schools. Administration officials testified against the bill, saying they are already boosting services.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/310561p-265714c.html