DOBSON — With a growing need for court room interpreters, Surry Community College is getting some help in drawing in new students.

The litigation section of the North Carolina Bar Association presented the college with a $3,000 scholarship check to pilot the section’s Interpretes para la Corte program. The scholarships will be used by SCC students to subsidize the certification testing necessary to become North Carolina Spanish-language court interpreters.

Costs associated with taking the weekend-long examination can run as high as $1,000 with the travel expenses to get to Raleigh where the administrative office of the courts is located, overnight housing and testing fees.

The programs is an initiative of the bar’s litigation section that seeks to improve access to justice for all North Carolinians by supporting the state’s administrative office of the courts in increasing the number of interpreters it certifies.

The certified interpreters help remove language barriers for non-English speakers who come in contact with the court system.

While the examination process takes only a weekend, the preparation for the exam takes much longer. Court interpreters should be fluent in both languages and should also have a good understanding of the court systems. Two programs at SCC are working to help people with both of those factors.

“We are trying to put together an opportunity for people to do both. The Community Spanish Interpreter’s program is going to make for good interpreters and we are going to add any kind of continuing education classes that are needed to offer things on the legal side,” said Wilborn Rives, instructor in paralegal technology. “Hopefully this will stimulate interest in the profession, once we get people certified it should start a chain reaction.”

One thing SCC hopes to do with these two programs and the available scholarship is to help improve the passing rates for the exam. According to Rives, in North Carolina, the passing rate for the previous year was 23 percent while the national passing rate was 26 percent.

There are 57 active certified Spanish court interpreters in North Carolina and the demand for more is still there.

Attorney Susan Giamportone, who helped develop the program, feels the partnership with SCC is a natural fit.

“As one of the few community colleges to offer both a community Spanish interpreter program and a paralegal program, working with Surry and its excellent faculty gave us the means by which to reach capable, qualified and interested students who could most successfully benefit from the scholarship funds and become AOC-certified courtroom interpreters,” she said in a press release.

Anyone interested in the scholarship, which will become available in October, or in getting more information about the program should contact Rives or Dr. Loida Peterson at Surry Community College at 386-8121 or 386-3257.