Happy Holidays from the SeSo, Inc. Family to Yours!

We hope you have a healthy, peaceful and joyful Holiday Season and a happy 2022! As we close 2021 and celebrate our eight-year history, we would like to thank all the professionals who support SeSo, Inc. and its mission to provide quality language access and strengthen communication and engagement with multicultural families.
We thank our Language Services Coordinators
María Calzado and Jessica Sanchez managed hundreds of requests for interpretation and translation services, connecting schools and trained professionals with efficiency, care and attention to detail. Thank you for building a strong team and supporting our growing Language Services Division!
We thank our team of Interpreters and Translators
This year, our trained professionals supported schools with very difficult pandemic-related meetings, many complex special education sessions, several schoolwide meetings where simultaneous interpretation was required, and hundreds of translated documents. They did so with the utmost professionalism and confidence in their skills. The feedback that we received from one of our clients says it all “I can tell when we have a SeSo, Inc. interpreter. Their professionalism and skills help our team remain involved in the conversation. We trust they are saying what we are saying!” Thank you to our team of interpreters and translators for building cultural and linguistic bridges in schools.  
We thank the school districts and organizations that support our work
We thank the school districts and organizations who trust us to provide the best professional development for their interpreters and translators. We covered 9 states in 2021, training over 300 bilingual staff members on the ethics and roles of interpreters in education. Our participants practiced simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, sight translation, and translation skills with role plays and documents specific to the education settings. Interpretation and translation teams in these school districts are now more cohesive and motivated to develop internal tools and resources to continue supporting their student population.   
A new cohort of bilingual professional in Arkansas received 40 hours of training as professional interpreters in education and completed the requirements to receive an Interpreter Credential recognized by the Arkansas Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education and the Arkansas Department of Education Division of Elementary and Secondary Education. They join a network of over 100 graduates of this unique program.
We thank our students
In 2021, 215 bilingual school staff and independent contract interpreters from 12 states participated in our University of Georgia Professional Interpreter in Education and Professional Interpreter in Special Education classes. Our Spanish, Amharic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Georgian, Russian, French, Swahili and Arabic speakers worked through ethical dilemmas, received concrete tools to elevate the professionalism of interpreters and translators in their districts, and are now part of a growing network of hundreds of professionals who have taken the courses in the past 10 years. We appreciate the school districts who make this course mandatory for their bilingual staff whose role includes interpretation and translation.
The Ph.D. Corner

Thank you, Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) and its English Learner Programs Office, for selecting us to lead its newly formed English Learner Programs Advisory Board! It is an honor to support the school district’s effort to explore the experiences of English Learner families and inform policy related to multilingual family engagement, language access and intercultural communication. As the largest and most diverse school district in Georgia, GCPS recognizes that family engagement is intertwined with communication and student achievement and we cannot wait to dive into this research with an esteemed group of professionals.  
Highlighting Our Strengths
Practicing Cultural Humility with Young Afghan Newcomers
“Labels can easily become essentializing, with educators assuming that all members of a group have the same needs, desires, aptitudes and behaviors.” Check out this great article about steps that schools can take to support newly-arrived Afghan students.
Empowering Hispanic/Latino University Students
We love to highlight young leaders making a difference in their communities. Read about a young University of Georgia student working tirelessly to impact her community and create a home for Hispanic/Latino students in a large university. 
Ana Soler, BSW, MPH - Ph.D. in Special Education Student