Schools soften landing for new immigrants

$1.3m effort focuses on language, culture

Newcomers Academy students (from left) Esmerlin Javier Baez, with sisters Sabine and Sylvie Casimir, explored a supermarket yesterday as part of their studies. The month-old program has 22 students. (Globe Staff Photo / Michele McDonald)

Until two months ago, Isamar Mejia was attending school in Santo Domingo and planning to become a lawyer. Then her mother and stepfather moved to Boston and told the 16-year-old she would have to finish school here, even though she spoke not a word of English and had never seen snow.

Like other teenage immigrants, Mejia faced the prospect of entering a school in the middle of the year, behind in her classes, confused by her surroundings, a prime candidate for dropping out, according to school statistics.

The nervous junior instead joined a new experiment by Boston public schools that is aiming to halve the system's dropout rate over the next four years by providing lessons in language and culture to older students who have recently arrived to the country. Mejia and 21 other students are now learning English and how to navigate the city's streets and customs at the Newcomers Academy, which is designed to ease the transition to diploma-granting schools.

"It's so hard when everyone speaks a language and you don't understand anything they're saying," Mejia said in Spanish, after showing off her new mastery of numbers in English. "You don't even know what to ask. I hope this will help me learn English, quickly."

The $1.3 million program is expected to grow next year to about 250 students who have limited English proficiency and who arrived in the United States after the school year started. A third of the targeted students have no reading or writing experience, even in their own language.

The month-old program, which is housed in the former Thompson Middle School in Dorchester, was born out of concerns about the system's dropout rate. In 2007, nearly a quarter of all students who started at a Boston high school were likely to drop out within the next five years, according to the most recent statistics.

A study of the system's dropout rate that year found that many who had quit school were immigrants who had arrived in the middle of the academic year. For the class of 2004, the study by the Parthenon Group found that 13 percent of its 1,053 dropouts were late-entering immigrants. It also found that only 36 percent of such students graduated within four years, and fewer than half graduated within six years.

"We are trying to intervene to improve their graduation rates," School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson said in a telephone interview. "This gives our families another option, and it helps us meet the needs of students as they make a very difficult transition."

But some educators have questioned whether Newcomers Academy will segregate new immigrants and make it harder for them to move to a regular school. Others worry that it could become a kind of scholastic ghetto, where students are funneled into a program that might hold them back.

"There has to be a clear exit strategy for the students," said Joh n Mudd, a senior project director at Massachusetts Advocates for Children. "The concern is that if we keep them in the program for too long, they become segregated or denied the opportunity to become part of the mainstream society. You don't want pockets of people who are not prepared to be part of the broader economy, civic culture, and political culture. They need to learn how to function."

Oscar Santos, headmaster of Boston International High School, said he is concerned about starting students in a program instead of at a school. He also worries that staggering their entry into the system could increase their disorientation and that grouping illiterate students with those who are learning English could potentially hold back the more educated students.

His solution would be to create more schools for recent immigrants, who he said are the fastest-growing portion of the student body. Nineteen percent of the district's 56,000 students lack proficiency in English.

"We shouldn't have a one-size-fits-all program," said Santos, whose school will move into the same building as the academy next year. "The students should have the option to go directly to a school, and I worry that we may be taking the most transient population, letting them build relationships, and then having them move again. We're potentially losing a lot of the good work."

Officials at Newcomers Academy said they view the program as a way to provide new immigrants with a "soft landing" in the system that can better prepare them to succeed at a regular school. Students will be referred to the program after screening required of all new students.

They said that the program will have a student-teacher ratio that will not exceed 15-to-1, significantly better than most city schools and that the students will receive a more individually styled education. Students will remain in the program for up to two years, but many will move to schools within weeks or months.

"The biggest challenge for many of these students is helping them make the very big adjustment of living and learning in a new country," said Nydia Méndez, director of the Newcomers Academy, which is modeled after similar programs in New York City. "They all arrive with zero English and different academic levels."

Many of the students come from hardscrabble backgrounds and require help.

One student from El Salvador, who said he had several friends killed by gangs there, is now working nights at McDonald's to help his mother pay for his trip to the United States. Another student survived the civil war in Sierra Leone and spent several years in refugee camps in Senegal before moving to Boston. Three sisters from Haiti are still learning to read and write.

For Isamar Mejia, the hardest part may be adjusting to the cold.

On her first day in the program, she got caught wearing sandals in a snowstorm and fainted from the frost. A teacher had to buy her socks, tights, and a hat.

On a recent assignment to learn the names of produce items at a nearby supermarket, which included a long walk in the cold, Mejia shivered as she showed off the English she had learned in the previous two months.

"I didn't have a choice to come here," she said. "It's hard, but I want to learn."

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.