Castro Feinberg, Rosa (1939-)

Rosa Castro Feinberg, born on lanuary 1, 1939, in New York City, has been a lifelong advocate for children, immigrants, and minority language learners in the United States. Upon election in 1986 to the Dade County, Florida, school board, she became the first Hispanic woman to be elected to a countywide office in that jurisdiction and served on the board with distinction for 10 years.

Castro Feinberg earned her MSc degree in curriculum and supervision from Florida State University and her PhD in Educational Administration from the University of Miami. She began her career as a language teacher. While teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at the junior high school level and Spanish-S (Spanish for Spanish speakers), she secured donated equipment and conducted a field trial that resulted in the district's purchase of its first wireless language laboratory for English language learners. As a graduate student at the University of Miami, Castro Feinberg had collected and analyzed data that led the school system to initiate programs for English language learners whose first language was Haitian Creole.

Castro Feinberg later served as education chairperson for the Spanish American League Against Discrimination (SALAD), where she wrote a primer for advocates that led to the mobilization of resistance [Page 117]to restrictionist language legislation and the creation of the national English Plus Clearinghouse.

As the director of the University of Miami Lau Center, acting as third-party adviser at the request of both the State Education Agency and a community coalition led by the Multicultural Education Training Associates (META), Castro Feinberg was influential in bringing about statewide changes in legislation and regulations protecting the rights of all language minority students in Florida to learn English and other subjects. She also promoted the establishment of the principle that those who teach any subject to English language learners, in any language, must be appropriately prepared and credentialed for that assignment.

As a Dade County School Board Member, Castro Feinberg provided leadership resulting in expansion of foreign, heritage language, and biliteracy education, benefiting over 300,000 students in the country's fourth-largest school district. She also helped eliminate corporal punishment in Miami-Dade Schools and helped bring about single-member districting in school board elections, thereby ensuring that Hispanics would serve on the board. For 8 of the 10 years that Castro Feinberg served on the Dade County School Board, she was the only Hispanic member.

As a member of Florida's Postsecondary Education Planning Commission, Castro Feinberg was instrumental in the commission's authorization of a Pharmacy School at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, the state's historically Black university. As a faculty member at Florida International University (FIU), Castro Feinberg organized a statewide electronic mailing list for second-language educators under the auspices of the Sunshine State Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) Advocacy Committee. She has published numerous articles, reports, and monographs on bilingual education and related areas of administration and teacher training and has given numerous invited testimonies at government public hearings on language and education issues.

After her retirement in 2002, the United Faculty of Florida/Florida International University Chapter (UFF/FIU) Executive Committee approved Castro Feinberg's proposal for sponsorship of an information and referral service for immigrants and other newcomers. The West Dade Regional Library agreed to collaborate with the project as the service site and with public information support. With 50,000 immigrants entering Miami-Dade County every year, its population is among the most diverse in the nation, and the city of Miami has the highest percentage of immigrants of any large city worldwide. The first goal of this project is to serve the community by providing information to recent arrivals about existing resources and to tap FIU faculty expertise for help with problems for which there is no ready solution. The service is a volunteer operation, requiring no funds for its continuation.

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