Making Americans by Jessica Lander

Author:Jessica Lander [Lander, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mayra had been EL director less than a year when, in 2003, she flew first to New York City and then to the California coast to visit long-established newcomer centers. Upon her return she promptly presented to Guilford’s school board her findings and a proposal for a newcomer center. They said no. A year later she tried again. Again no. Every few weeks a child, recently arrived from the steppes of Nepal or a Ugandan refugee camp, would be placed in a neighborhood school alongside American-born students. Some classrooms had resources and support; many did not. Mayra’s team approached the school board again. For a third time they denied the request. Stubbornly, in 2006, the team petitioned once more. Guilford had a new superintendent and the district was seeing a sharp spike in new arrivals. Their Newcomers School opened the following fall.

Over the course of a year, roughly four hundred children will move through the classrooms of Newcomers, nine-year-olds to nineteen-year-olds. Expectations are high. “If our students have one year of growth in reading, the school’s curriculum facilitator, Maria Valeria Rivas de Kouba, explained, “we are not doing our job.” Newcomers would never catch up. “We would only be maintaining the gap.” With small classes, highly trained teachers, volunteer tutors, reading specialists, carefully crafted curricula, concentrated resources, and dedicated counselors and social workers, students learn in two months what in other schools might take seven.

Yet year after year, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has assigned the school an F rating. School scores are based on the percentage of students attaining proficiency on annual tests and the percentage of students who demonstrate growth. Few newcomers in the country less than a year can demonstrate proficiency on academic tests in English. Growth is measured by comparing students’ progress across years, but the school’s students take the state test only once during their time at Newcomers and thus can’t demonstrate improvement. Fortunately, district leadership knows that the rating tells only a small part of the story. They see the results in their students and they have come to believe in Mayra and her team.

Trust took time. Again and again Mayra’s team showed up. When a summer literacy program needed an attendance database, the EL department offered its templates and support. When the magnet schools’ fair needed extra hands, Mayra’s team set up tables, handed out packets of information, and directed families. When a national program offering free dental care offered to treat district students, Mayra’s team launched a partnership. When books for a summer reading program for Indigenous students arrived late, the EL department drove door to door dropping them off with families.

By 2009 the department had developed a reputation. So when Mayra and her EL coordinator Bob rang the assistant director of transportation, he was amused but not surprised. More and more newcomers were arriving in Guilford, and many struggled with schoolwork. Could a bus be converted, they asked, into a mobile tutoring program that drove directly to the homes

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