“When the Rafael Hernandez School opened as a bilingual public elementary school in the 1970s, Boston’s school department “was grabbing anyone who knew Spanish” to work in its classrooms, recalled Mary-Lynda Daley of Cohasset, who formerly taught there.
“One of the new hires was Blanca Burgos, who had arrived in the United States from Guatemala at age 15, speaking no English. She was a young wife and mother of two who had earned a high school equivalency diploma when she began working as a paraprofessional, or teacher’s assistant, in the Roxbury school’s first-grade classes in 1974.
” ‘Paraprofessionals for us were the voice of the community,” Daley said, adding that they were often the main source of communication between Spanish-speaking parents and their children’s teachers. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree, Mrs. Burgos took on a classroom of her own in the 1980s. She taught many grade levels and subjects before retiring in 2012 from the Hernandez…