Boy, do I have a story for you.
As an agency owner and fellow interpreter I’ve been privy to several concerns and complaints over the last several months. They seemed too wild to take seriously despite coming from reasonable colleagues. They were outrageous. They were cartoonishly silly. They were not connected to me or my agency, but again, they came from reasonable colleagues and they were all centered on the same problem.
The problem is falsifying interpreting credentials. Your mind probably just raced to the BEI Registry and RID’s Registry. You’re right, those are quick and valuable checks when you’re vetting an interpreter. There’s a nationwide body of interpreters who can’t be vetted with the same transparency, though. The EIPA doesn’t publish testing results or scores (scores being necessary with varying state criteria for K-12 interpreting). In this case, a person is reported to have doctored their EIPA results certificate to a score at or above the Colorado minimum of 3.5 after several failed attempts to reach the minimum 60% of the information on the test being accurately interpreted. They’re then reported to have submitted a scan of the doctored certificate in their online application to CDE.
In Colorado, I think most of us assume that the Colorado Department of Education validates EIPA certificates provided by K-12 interpreting applicants. They don’t until there’s a problem. I learned this as I made my formal report to CDE regarding the concerns my colleagues brought me. To their credit, CDE’s response to the report was professional and prompt with student safety and rights at the forefront of all of our communication. But that’s all for now. Until the interpreting grapevine is activated or disciplinary actions are published, we won’t know what they will or won’t find in their own investigation.
You may be frustrated that my colleagues didn’t report this on their own. I’m frustrated that they didn’t feel safe enough or trust their agency enough to be able to do the right thing and not suffer retaliation. As an agency owner, the person in question can’t hurt me, nor can their hiring agency.
While I wait for the state’s investigation to run its course, here’s what I’m thinking about:
- If someone is comfortable telling a lie about themselves to the State, there’s more going on.
- Why would someone tell such a whopper to work in such a tough setting? To work for such middling pay?
- Do they just have their heart set on the social cachet of being an interpreter and they’d be too easily found out as a community interpreter?
- If accounts of their skills are accurate, why is the agency placing this person where they’re not able to provide a reasonable service?
- Why does their alma mater have no record of any of their published degrees?
- What other vulnerable groups have they possibly targeted in the past? Hearing children? People with intellectual disabilities? Senior citizens?
- Why would someone tell such a lie in order to work with children?
- What do we do next in Colorado to address the lack of oversight?