urther, more than 28,000 children who have crossed the U.S. border without their parents since 2014 are estimated to be living in California. Most of these unaccompanied minors reside in Alameda and Los Angeles counties. In the Oakland Unified School District alone, schools served 2,862 newcomer students in 2017–18, defined by the district as those who have been in the U.S. less than three years and who speak a language other than English at home.

With immigration policy debates shifting by the day and population trends often difficult to predict, experts at the national, state and local levels say the best approach for districts and boards is to cast politics aside and focus on understanding where these students come from, what services they need and how the education system can welcome them as assets.

These approaches often rely on officials being proactive by reaching out to students, their families and parents or guardians. “Because waiting for them to come to the school is more difficult in this time when you see everything on the news that is happening,” said Veronica Aguila, director of the CDE’s Migrant Education Program.

Knowing who they are and where they’ve been

Who are California’s students? That’s the first question board members, administrators and educators should always ask, but it’s even more imperative with immigrant and newcomer students, said Lauren Markham, community school program manager at Oakland International High School.

In addition to working at the school, an alternative site serving students who recently came to the U.S., Markham is a writer and immigrant advocate who often speaks at events about her 2017 book, The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of An American Life. The work chronicles the journey of identical twins who, at 17, traded El Salvador’s gang violence for the trials of life as undocumented immigrants in Oakland.

The brothers’ escape from violence and turmoil in Central America is a familiar one for many immigrant students, said Julie Sugarman, senior policy analyst for PreK-12 education at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.

“Certainly, what we’ve been hearing from schools is that the Central American young people have stories and experiences that are very different from immigrants who have come before them,” Sugarman said.

Markham’s research and reporting highlights that high numbers of unaccompanied minors have come to the U.S. from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, while Sugarman said officials are now seeing more families with younger kids. Overall, Sugarman said migration experts have not seen much of a drop in activity despite enhanced fears and coverage about U.S. border activity and policies. “It really hasn’t dropped off that much. There still are a lot of people coming,” she said.

Administrators and educators should try to learn about their students’ upbringings and circumstances while still respecting privacy and topics that might stir bad memories, Sugarman said. “You want to get to know someone if you need to have any kind of interaction with them, but just as you wouldn’t reveal certain things on a first date, you also wouldn’t ask a student about some kinds of experiences when you’re first getting to know them,” she said.

While not every student may have escaped gang violence, poverty or left their families in their home countries, the CDE’s Aguila said it’s critical to remember the characteristic they have in common is that they have all gone through a major change. “I think just the fact that you move from one country to another is a trauma,” she said, recalling her legal migration from Mexico to the U.S. when she was 9 that left her feeling like an outsider.

“Even when you learn English, you’re still feeling that culture clash because your culture is so different than the culture of America,” Aguila added.

With that clash in mind, Aguila said the CDE has been excited to implement the California English Learner Roadmap, which looks at the learning environment for all newcomers. “The fact that we now have a state policy that embraces multilingualism or sees students as assets that have another language or another culture is really something that we’re promoting,” she said.

Reaching out and welcoming students and their families

While meeting the academic and social-emotional needs of newcomer students hinges upon the school system’s understanding of them, experts say newcomer student success also depends on how well the students and their families understand the school system and its connections.

Los Angeles Unified School District is well versed in welcoming and enrolling new students from a myriad of countries and backgrounds. The district employs an array of centrally housed services through its School Enrollment Placement and Assessment Center to ease their transition. Coordinator Nicole Mitchell said offerings include enrollment, mental health and social service referrals, immunizations, nutrition services, legal assistance referrals and health insurance enrollment information.

Recognizing that many families or guardians are unfamiliar with the public school system or other entities, Mitchell and her staff educate and guide clients to make sure they aren’t being taken advantage of in areas such as housing and health care. “When you’re not from here, you don’t know any of this information,” she said.

The CDE recommends this approach and uses a similar model for the state’s migrant education program for children of agricultural workers. Aguila of the CDE’s Migrant Education Program said districts can use liaisons who better understand community and cultural dynamics to share information about educational and community programs. Policy analyst Sugarman said some schools and districts do go above and beyond by connecting newcomer students and their families to services by going into the community and visiting preschools, churches and community centers.

With many districts enrolling students at a school-site level, however, she said opportunities may be lost to make connections with interpreters and to build trust. “There are some places that ought to look more carefully at having a centralized intake center, especially for multilingual families,” she said.

That trust, Mitchell said, is at the very core of the issue. She said school districts have a unique relationship with their communities in that the information they provide comes with a sense of authenticity. In other words, compared to some institutions that are feared in a heated political climate, many people understand that public schools are there to support them.

Cipriano Vargas’ parents didn’t fit that mold as migrant farmworkers when he was a young student. The Vista Unified School District trustee said they originally had more of a notion that “the only reason that a teacher or school is calling the house is that I’m in trouble.”

Vargas said his district, just inland from Oceanside in San Diego County, works hard to dispel that type of reaction, focusing on community outreach to inform parents and guardians about everything from a student’s need for reading glasses to nearby food pantries they can access. He said the mindset behind the work comes from a perspective of “understanding the cultural competencies and what can teachers, what can staff members do to make sure that not just our students are welcome, but also, how do we support our parents?”

Offering resources and supports

In addition to coming to California’s public school system with their own cultural stories and backgrounds, Vargas said immigrant students bring varied levels of academic proficiency to the classroom. “There are students who come in and they have a quality education from where they’re coming from, whether that be Mexico or Guatemala, and then we have students who come from areas where they have not had a quality education,” he said.

Additionally, Vargas said it can be easier to integrate younger students into the K-12 system, as opposed to older students arriving in high school who are already facing graduation deadlines and considering college or career options. Some newcomer students may have also only completed a year or two of schooling in their home countries, creating a large gap that can be difficult to fill in a short time.

The Migration Policy Institute’s Sugarman in 2017 authored a report, Beyond Teaching English: Supporting High School Completion by Immigrant and Refugee Students, which highlights the fact that the pressure to go from limited literacy to a high school diploma in a few years can be overwhelming for some students. “I think the really big challenge with all of this is this question of inclusion versus segregation,” she said in discussing how schools can best incorporate these students into general classrooms while still providing targeted support.

Vargas is hopeful that the state’s focus on dual-language learning can promote the inclusion of newcomer students into the school environment. “How can we leverage that not just to their own benefit but to the benefit of the entire district?” he asked.

The funding question

The advent of the Local Control Funding Formula has also brought critics who say funds designated for underserved student groups aren’t always reaching those students. But Sugarman said it’s difficult to separate and track which funds are making an impact in which areas. “There’s a lot about the general atmosphere, the general teaching corps, that matters to these kids,” she said. “If you can’t recruit and retain the best teachers, that matters for at-risk kids, so those things can be a top priority in those situations.”

In addition to a quality teaching force, all students benefit from a multi-tiered and holistic resource and support structure. But both Aguila and Vargas point to the state’s subpar average per-pupil funding and staff ratios as major obstacles in such efforts — particularly for English learners and other underserved groups that might need more guidance from counselors, nurses and other classified staff.

“Back in the ’80s, when I became a teacher, we had counselors at every elementary school,” Aguila said. “We don’t have that currently, and I think that’s one of the missing pieces.”

Similarly, Vargas said districts must be creative to meet an ever-growing list of responsibilities that fall under their purview to meet the needs of every student.

“As we see the level of funding, it becomes harder for school districts to tackle all of these needs,” he said. “For example, when there is a family that gets deported or a parent that gets deported, there’s a social-emotional toll on the child. So now we have to get our social worker to be there, and, by all means, we’re going to do that.”

To help newcomer students close at least some of their educational gaps, Aguila said the CDE encourages districts and schools to offer supplemental programs, after-school programs, Saturday school, newcomer programs and dual-language programs, noting that the federal Every Student Succeeds Act allows use of all levels of Title funds to provide for the needs of immigrant students, not just Title III (Immigrant Student Program).

But at the very core, Sugarman said caring, knowledgeable and properly trained teachers and staff are paramount to welcoming immigrant students who bring their own cultural experiences, including traumas, to California’s schools in an often-jarring national political climate.

“That has got to be a priority, putting English learners, especially newcomers, in mainstream classrooms with teachers who know how to teach them,” she said.

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Andrew Cummins is a staff writer for California Schools.