Language Access Plan (LAP)

Greetings - I am adding the highlights here for you to share with your staff members regarding the Language Access Plan. An Online training for staff is planned and will be happening sometime in August via the LMS platform, but it will be nice if our staff is informed earlier rather than latter. I was told by the Language Access Committee Chair that he is going around City Hall and putting Language Identification Guides on every desk. So, there is a potential that we will start to get questions.

Here is a link to the stats sheet. Again, this was my attempt to create something we could use, but please feel free to tweak it, make more user friendly, personalize it and above all share your creative ideas with your colleagues.  Moving forward, we will start collecting statistics. I would like to start collecting these effective July 1st, 2014, start of new fiscal year for the City of Houston.

• Houston is very diverse city that is no surprise to us all. Almost 25% population over age of 5 doesn’t speak English very well. In US Limited English Proficiency (LEP) grew by 80% between 1990-2010; 9% of US population is LEP
• 14.4% TX population is LEP
• 21% Harris County population is LEP
• Federal, State and Local governments are taking steps to develop plans to provide efficient and effective services to LEP immigrant population.
• Other major cities have also developed LAP: New York, San Francisco, Massachusetts, DOJ, Oakland, Hawaii, Nebraska, Hennepin County, MN
• Executive Order 1-17 was signed by Mayor Parker on 7/31/13. It mandates all public facing City departments to establish policies for providing information about City services, programs, and activities to residents and visitors with limited English language proficiency.
• HPL is already spending  close to $600,000 on foreign language material and electronic databases.
• City-wide committee was appointed to develop the LAP. HPL along with various other city departments has developed the Plan. The plan includes 5 documents that will be translated in 5 languages that the committee identified as most widely spoken in Houston based on census date: Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic and Urdu.
• The 5 library documents that will be translated in 5 languages are: Library Card Application, Know about your library card; Rules of Library use; Location Guide; & World Languages Brochure.
• The Committee has developed protocol for staff for serving LEP and waiting for approval from ARA
• Mayor’s designee is reaching out to the International community and advisory council to get their input to engage the community and market the services.
• Still working on establishing a reporting document. Greg is working on the back end and we will have to tweak how we gather our statistics so I can report the numbers to the Committee.
• The language identification cards are already on City website: www.ispeakhouston.org. I am working with Greg to have these distributed to all locations along with a plastic sign holder.
• Staff training will be provided. The goal is to work with HTV to develop a video that will be hosted on the LMS platform and all public facing staff will have to complete the training on how to assist LEP customers.
• Committee looking for a city wide contract for translation & interpretation services.
• The first step in the implementation plan is to distribute the language ID cards and collect statistics. In the next phase we will have the translated documents.
• Here is a link to the Language Identification Guide. There is no change in how we assist customers who only speak Spanish language. Continue the way you have been helping our Spanish only speaking customers.. If you get customers that speak any language that no one on your staff can assist with, please call 311 for assistance.  Please let your customers know that 311 service is available and they can request to be assisted in  languages other than English. Please review AP:2-11 for more details.

Please let me know if you have any question.

Best regards,

Shammi