School officials say they are working to help Bangladeshi high school students – who have studied from tattered photocopies for years – to purchase books and dictionaries in their native language.

In response to repeated requests for textbooks to help them learn English, officials from Long Island City High School will be working with the office of the superintendent of Queens high schools and the Board of Education to find vendors willing to publish the books.

“This is a top priority,” said Vivian Selenikas, assistant principal of second languages at Long Island City High School, which has about 200 Bangladeshi students. “It’s hard to find the books. But we are committed to doing this and making our students competitive with students from other cultures.”

Last month, Newsday reported that Bangladeshi students, teachers and parents were frustrated and angered by the fact that the estimated 3,600 Bangladeshi students enrolled in the city school system, most of them in public schools in Astoria and Long Island City, don’t have any Bengali-language books.

Still, teachers, students and administrators at Long Island City High School remain optimistic. They are contacting foundations and vendors both in Bangladesh and in the United States to see if books can be produced, Selenikas said. And officials from the Board of Education, who last month said they didn’t have records of what happened to the approval of books from Bangladesh, invited the school to resubmit the book list.

Bangladeshi students make up one of the fastest-growing non-English speaking immigrant groups in New York City, where 9,556 from that country settled between 1990 and 1994, according to the Department of City Planning’s most recent data.

While teachers and advocates have asked for the books for five years, none of the materials from Bangladesh has met the Board of Education’s approval in terms of paper and content quality, said Shikha Dalal, a Bengali resource specialist with the Asian Languages Bilingual Educational Technical Assistance Center in Brooklyn.

“People in general are very upset,” Dalal said. “We are really putting our heads together to get this one very basic thing – books.”

The lack of foreign language books is a common one in diverse schools across the country, said Connie Bernardi, bilingual English as a second language liaison from Queens high schools. Vendors just don’t find it profitable to produce books for small populations, she said.

“We had this problem in Brooklyn and Staten Island with Arabic books,” Bernardi said. “And we had it in Queens with finding a vendor to make books for the Haitians.”

Languages such as Spanish are not a problem because vendors see the large population in the area, Bernardi said. Her office has been producing glossaries for students who speak languages with smaller populations, and employees are always looking for foundations who would want to publish the books, she said.

“We do a lot of reproducing,” she said. “It’s an up-by-your-bootstrap issue. This is a problem throughout the country; we see it first in Queens since we have the largest population with these small groups.”

At Long Island City High School, Abul Azad, a Bangladeshi English-as-a-second-language teacher, said he needs several hundred books. He would even be willing to translate English books into his language by himself. “This is an important part of their education,” said Azad, who spends hours each week photocopying books from Bangladesh that school officials determined were not of sufficient quality to justify buying them for all students. “We will do everything we can.”



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