School, Community and English Language Learners: Intake Center as Pathway to Assimilation
Summary: The primary goal of this module is for the reader to become aware of the support a school division “Intake Center” contributes to helping an ever increasing English language learner population assimilate into the local schools and local community.
Introduction
Each year, the United States becomes more linguistically diverse and public schools are mirroring this trend. Students from non-English–speaking backgrounds represent the fastest-growing subset of the K-12 student population (Short & Echevarria, 2005). In the 2003-2004 school year, 5.5 million school-age children were English language learners (Leos, 2004). The Bank Street Literacy Guide website notes that by the year 2010, over thirty percent of all school-age children will come from homes in which the primary language is not English (http://www.bnkst.edu/literacyguide/ell.html). In the particular school division under study, English language learners represent almost 40% of the school age population. With this rapid change in linguistic and ethnic demographics comes the need for a small school division to make immediate adjustments. The creation of a centrally located Intake Center has served as one such adjustment in order to better serve the families of English language learners, the local school division and the local community. The history of this initiative, the services provided by the Intake Center, the challenges for the Intake Center as well as the successes will be discussed.
Historical Perspective
Harrisonburg City Public Schools (4,300 students, 45 different languages spoken) in Harrisonburg Virginia has watched it’s ELL (English Language Learner) population increase from 6% to 39% in just thirteen years. The increase in newcomers was due to the fact that 1) The Shenandoah Valley was deemed a refugee resettlement area by the state government, 2) The unemployment in the area is at 2.8%, and 3) many local churches have participated in the sponsorship of families from around the world. The school division quickly understood that this was having significant implications on the educational structure of the division especially given the AYP (annual yearly progress) requirements mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001). The division quickly began addressing this influx by hiring multiple English as second language teachers and requiring all teachers and administrators to participate in SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) training (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2004) but new challenges began to surface. The front office at each of the local schools was getting inundated with new arrivals from all over the world and was having a very difficult time helping family’s register for school. Difficulty in the front office was evident in two ways. First, the office staff in most cases did not speak the native language of the arrivals so they would have to locate someone who could speak the language which was time consuming and took the interpreters out of their daily teaching duties as ESL teachers and secondly the paperwork for one registration was taking a significant amount of time away from support staff who was typically spent their time supporting the school’s teachers and administration.
In 2003 the local school board members and a committee of educators and administrators visited Arlington, Virginia schools which is richly diverse (105 different languages spoken), which has a centrally located building which serves as a one-stop provider for students and families who speak English as a second language. The board was impressed and agreed to implement the same thing on a smaller scale in the Harrisonburg community. When establishing the program, there was some concern of community backlash however it was minimal due to the following: 1) The Central Office administration was already committed to opening the Intake Center as well as the local school board. 2) The school worked diligently at educating the community about the ESL population, this involved the Intake Center giving interviews to the press and talking to community groups about the needs and reasons around the ESL community in Harrisonburg, and 3) The school division’s superintendent received state wide attention for challenging the No Child Left Behind requirements to test ESL children after one year of English classes including receiving superintendent of the year award 2006-2007 in the state of Virginia. So overall this demonstrated a very supportive school system and community that responded actively providing information to the general public about the positive aspects of Harrisonburg's diversity. When negative articles or information comes up there is a large and responsive group of people that are willing to speak out in favor of the newcomers to Harrisonburg. Groups like the Harrisonburg/Rockingham Intercultural Alliance and the Hispanic Service Council have been very positive to bring a variety of agencies together each month and address these issues and other major concerns of the immigrant population.
In 2004, the school division officially responded by creating what was entitled “Intake Center” (a name that does not translate well in other languages).This became a place where every English Language Learner came with his or her family to register for school and take mandatory pre-assessments in order to assess the academic level of the student and be placed in the appropriate ESL classes and help connect with other programs and agencies in the community that provide health, economic assistance, literacy, childcare, interpretation and other services.
Home School Liaisons
A student may come to the local community and live with a grandparent who is established. The grandparent in many cases will not have seen the child since he or she was very small and now an adolescent is residing in the home. This leads to generation challenges, culture challenges, family challenges, space and freedom challenges including issues revolving around dances, dating, and drugs. The school division immediately hired 1 full time elementary school liaison, 2 full time middle school liaisons and 1 ½ high school liaisons in order to serve over 1000 English language learners in order to help the families navigate this transition. The role of the liaison is to be on call by the Intake Center when registering families to serve as interpreters and home/school/community advocates. The liaisons have contracted hours during the summer and throughout the school year they serve the Intake Center as needed. During the school year the liaisons serve as teacher assistants in the schools to provide content support in their respective languages. The division has 1 ½ time Russian support staff serving 6 schools and over 120 students, 1 ½ time Kurdish support staff and the others serve those speaking Spanish as their first language. At times when the liaisons are not needed they work at the Intake Center translating documents into various languages to help particular schools with school wide documents such as the school handbooks.
Additional Community Challenges
There is a tremendous need for more services than what can be provided. There are two different immigrant groups arriving to the community. The first is primarily Russian, Kurdish and Cuban who are coming with refugee status. These groups have all documentation and access to social workers providing 3-6 months of service. The second group of immigrants arriving is coming to improve the quality of live and for economic and educational opportunities. This particular group, in many cases, is in dire need of social services. There are many secondary implications in the school especially when students have barely escaped with life and maybe some family members did not escape at all. The division is seeing the affects on the ability of the students to learn. There is a tremendous amount of trauma that occurs in the journey to the local community. Many in this second group also come with very little documentation creating additional challenges. The Intake Center connects many of these newcomers with local agencies and small outreach service providers in order to receive a social worker, and other basic needs met. The Intake Center also posts all the different places where English is taught in the community from private tutors to formal classroom instruction.
A second challenge was the initial registration paper work. On any given day a school would have three different students to register for school in three different languages and all the data was collected by hand so the Intake Center has created computerized forms and the information is immediately typed into a database in English so all parties involved are able to glean immediate helpful information about the newcomer.
One additional challenge that the division has only begun to address is the intra-group culture relational conflicts. There are currently many groups coming from rival countries with their own language dialects, cultural values, beliefs and morals and they are all competing for the same services. There are at times discriminatory acts one to another. This is heightened in the acts of those students who are older and still attending the local high school. The division was set up so that many of the newcomers could spend up to six years in high school. An English language learner could be twenty-one years of age before graduating. The division was experiencing many age and culture difficulties so the Intake Center partnered with the local university, who received a grant, in order to begin the Career Development Academy which included an accelerated English program, job training and GED preparation at the university for students ages 18-25. This has served as a wonderful beginning to addressing some of the age and culture challenges at hand.
Additional Supports
The Intake Center registers all English language learners for the school division. All pre-assessments are completed prior to entering school and the information is disseminated to the appropriate school personnel. The Intake Center links families to those medical facilities who are taking new patients, make referrals on where to get their shots, help parents fill out forms including head start applications. There is advice given about the importance of learning English and house brochures to one can see where to go for English training from free to professional instruction. Since 80% of the families registering for school speak Spanish, phone books printed in Spanish are provided. The Intake Center posts advertisements about school registration in the Kurdish, Russian and Spanish food markets as well as in the local Spanish newspaper. The Intake Center connects each family with a home school liaison that leads the family through school orientation and serves as an interpreter when a basic need arises. Many of the families fear deportation so the Intake Center helps the family understand that the school system does not require proof of legal status in order to go to school. The division only needs documentation that shows that they live with in the city limits. The Home School Liaison workers pick up some of these others issues on what is needed to get legal papers. They can make referrals to immigration lawyers. Sometimes the staff will make referrals for people wanting to establish legal guardianship of a family member when the parents live in another location or country.
What does success look like?
Currently the Intake Center is located in a “trailer”. When the location changes from a temporary existence to a permanent building, when the name changes to the “Welcome Center” which is being considered, and when the Intake Center works with all students who come into the school division instead of only the English language learners, that will mark being successful. Currently the division is very successful in providing services for 90% of the new student population; the ESL, Kindergarten and Pre-School families. The Kindergarten and Pre-School registration was added in June 2007 for the entire division regardless of what language was spoken.
The division measures the Intake Center’s effectiveness each year by providing feedback from the school administration and the Central Office on whether services are being provided that are needed. Each year the Intake Center has been adding services as the schools have provided ideas for helping the division solve the problems surrounding enrollment. This past year the Intake Center processed all the ESL re-entry students and the ESL transfer students between Elementary schools during the year.
School leaders, when attempting to help English language learners assimilate into the school division and community, may consider easing the burden on individual school office staff and creating a more welcoming central location in order to process registration. The creation of an Intake Center not only helps the schools but forms a rich relationship with community agencies and service providers alike. And most importantly the creation of an Intake Center contributes to the overall success of the student, the student’s family and the success of the school division.
Resources:
Bank Street’s Guide to Literacy for Volunteers and Tutors. Retrieved June 26, 2007 from http://www.bnkst.edu/literacyguide/ell.html
Echevarria, J., Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2004). Making content comprehensible to English learners: The SIOP model. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Leos, K. (2004). No child left behind. Paper presented at the annual conference of the National Association for Bilingual Education, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Short, D., & Echevarria, J. (2005). Teacher skills to support English language learners. Educational Leadership. December/January, 9-13.
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Last edited by National Council of Professors of Educational Administration on Jul 3, 2007 10:09 am GMT-5.