Educator Spotlight: How Dr. Ray Sanchez Is Revolutionizing Multilingual Education in Tarrytown Schools

Ray Sanchez is an educator with over 25 years of experience working in public schools in New York State. Since 2023, he has served as the superintendent of the Tarrytown's school district, and was recently named New York State Superintendent of the Year for his persistent and thoughtful approach to improving the educational experience of all students, including those with unique needs. In the short time he’s been with Tarrytown, Sanchez has already made a considerable impact, especially on one particular demographic: multilingual learners (MLs). 

The Unique Challenges of Being a Multilingual Learner  

MLs often experience specific kinds of difficulties that their non-ML classmates don’t, from the language barrier itself to the social and emotional strains they may experience as a result. Despite our best efforts, educators often lack the resources, knowledge, and experience to address the needs of ML students and as a result, they fall behind – sometimes permanently. The Tarrytowns are a small but diverse district, at about 2,600 students, 60% of whom are Hispanic or Latino and about 50% receive free or reduced lunch. MLs make up a significant cohort, at 17.8% of the student body.  

Sanchez himself is not only determined, but uniquely situated to improve the experience of multilingual students – the child of Cuban immigrants, his first language was Spanish, so he has the lived experience of being a ML student.  

“It's incumbent upon us as leaders and as school systems to continually adapt based on the needs of our students, and what I mean by that, specifically, it's not about having our students fit our systems, it's about adapting the systems to meet the needs of our children.” 

Moving Beyond a Single Story 

During the 2024-2025 school year, Sanchez introduced a tool for understanding the students of Tarrytown: the DESSA, an assessment that evaluates students’ resilience skills and mental health strengths, providing teachers with data about their students’ individual learning styles and even offering insight into their personalities and classroom behavior. The DESSA is administered in students’ native language, so educators get a full and accurate view of students’ social-emotional resiliencies and strengths in areas like social awareness and responsible decision-making. 

“The affective filter is basically…a metaphorical term that refers to a learner’s emotional and psychological state that can either facilitate or hinder language learning. So if one has less stress, they’re more capable of acquiring the language...we also know that as our multilingual learners enter our spaces, we might be actually fostering, creating more stress, or they’re coming in with high levels of stress, so it does impact their second language acquisition.”  

Social-Emotional Learning: Another Piece of the Puzzle 

During the 2024-2025 school year, Sanchez introduced a tool for understanding the students of Tarrytown: the DESSA, an assessment that evaluates students’ resilience skills and mental health strengths, providing teachers with data about their students’ individual learning styles and even offering insight into their personalities and classroom behavior. The DESSA is administered in students’ native language, so educators get a full and accurate view of students’ social-emotional resiliencies and strengths in areas like social awareness and responsible decision-making.  

Dr. Sanchez speaks about the importance of the “affective filter” concept as it relates to language acquisition.  

“The affective filter is basically…a metaphorical term that refers to a learner’s emotional and psychological state that can either facilitate or hinder language learning. So if one has less stress, they’re more capable of acquiring the language...we also know that as our multilingual learners enter our spaces, we might be actually fostering, creating more stress, or they’re coming in with high levels of stress, so it does impact their second language acquisition.”  

Dr. Sanchez and his team use the DESSA for measuring students’ existing social and emotional strengths, which serve as protective factors that can help mitigate the impact of stress, both on academic achievement and overall mental well-being. In addition to identifying students’ strengths, the DESSA helps educators identify growth opportunities for individual students in skills such as self-awareness, self management, social awareness, responsible decision making, and optimistic thinking. 

“Until more recently, when we started to use DESSA, this part of our storytelling about our multilingual learners was absent,” Sanchez says, “so this provided different perspectives and different stories that we can tell, not only amongst our educators in our in our buildings and in the classrooms, but at the district level.” 

Tarrytown schools have only used the DESSA for one year, but they’ve found it immensely valuable and are excited to see how it may impact their approach to ML education going forward.  

“This information has been instrumental in driving some of our work for our multilingual learners in this coming year, and I would say, quite honestly, very impactful for us – even after one year of administration.”