Californians Together hosted a Nov. 7 webinar featuring lawyers and school practitioners discussing undocumented youth, partnership models for local educational agencies and legal service providers, and what’s next for federal and state policy.
“In supporting our immigrant students and communities, we are facing extraordinary uncertainty and challenges in the coming months and years,” said Sam Finn, director of Newcomer Policy and Practice.
Immigrant students in their first years at U.S. schools often require specialized curricula and instruction to succeed academically, as well as access to numerous social services to meet housing, food, legal aid and mental health needs. Commonly referred to as “newcomer” students, this group may include refugees and asylees who fled their country of origin because of persecution, war or violence; students with interrupted formal education who are behind multiple grade levels in academic content because of limited schooling in their country of origin; or even unaccompanied minors or undocumented students.
Experts who spoke during the webinar were largely focused on unaccompanied and undocumented youth.
Melissa Adamson, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law, noted that this group could include newcomer children that arrive as refugees seeking asylum or other forms of immigration relief. Without consistent data, she said it’s difficult to determine how many of these students are enrolled in California schools.
Still, it’s important to identify students who need additional services — both those common among newcomers and those that depend upon their unique circumstances.
“In general, many of the children that I’ve spoken with have shared experiencing deep poverty and a severe lack of access to basic services before they left their home. Things like lack of food and water and shelter and medical care. Many of the children that I’ve interviewed have shared that they’ve experienced direct violence or threats to their safety,” Adamson said. “But these children are not a monolithic population. They have really different needs. You could have a child from Guatemala that speaks an indigenous language like Kʼicheʼ and grew up farming in a really rural area. And you could have a kid from urban Kabul who speaks Dari and English and was about to enter college when they were evacuated. And so, when we talk about kids coming to our border, these are kids with really diverse life experiences and really different needs.”
What LEAs are doing
Katie Annand, managing attorney with Immigrant Legal Defense (ILD), explained the work she does with students in LEAs including Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Based in Oakland, ILD works with K-12 schools that have identified students in need of services to provide them with legal representation in court and provide community outreach and advocacy.
Around 2013, Oakland International High School, which specializes in supports for newcomer students, started seeing a drastic uptick in the numbers of unaccompanied children under the age of 18. “They noticed that these young people, the students, had court dates and no lawyers to help them go to court,” Annand recalled.
In response, the community school manager began building partnerships with legal service providers and advocated for funds for the school district and other creative collaborations to create a system that helps identify unaccompanied children and families with unmet needs, and have expanded that districtwide with the goal of connecting students and families to immigration legal services, she explained.
“OUSD helps identify students in their central office during enrollment with various questions — not asking directly about immigration status, which they cannot do — but questions and offering services for families enrolling, about connecting them or learning more about immigration support,” Annand said. “And the district keeps a wait list for students and families who then might need help finding immigration support, and OUSD staff are in constant contact with ILD and other organizations.”
Ivan Garcia, a secondary school counselor at Richmond High School in West Contra Costa USD, immigrated from Mexico when he was 16 years old. “I was a newcomer at Richmond High, the school that I work at,” he said. “I know that sometimes, for students, it is difficult for them to trust in the system, to have a trusting adult that they can reach out to when they have questions about their immigration status. But I just think that it’s important for us as educators to keep sharing this type of information with them repeatedly … to let them know that there are resources here in the community and these types of partnerships where they can have access to an immigration attorney that can explain their rights and can help them through these difficult processes.”
After ILD lawyers started working with more students in his LEA, Garcia said he and other adults on campus noticed that students were more confident once they had a better understanding about the complexities of the immigration system and knew more about their rights and their options.
“Teachers have shared with me that their students who were experiencing problems with attendance and behavior issues … They have seen an improvement in attendance and other areas of the students’ academic progress,” Garcia said. “It’s pretty rewarding and just let us know that the partnership is working and it is good to have this type of resource for students available at the schools.”
