Culture
Remaking High School for Immigrant Kids
In the suburbs of Washington, D.C., one school system has opened small campuses especially for recent immigrants.
Alison Hanks-Sloan wanted to know how to keep her students from dropping out. A former ESOL teacher, she was working in the international students’ office at Prince George’s County Public Schools, a large suburban system in Maryland, right next to Washington, D.C. Just two-thirds of the county’s English language learners were graduating high school at all, let alone on time.
Immigrants make up one-third of the system’s 128,000 students. New students are arriving all the time, including, recently, about 500 who crossed unaccompanied into the U.S. from Mexico. They’re not only adjusting to a new country, but to family members they may never have met before and to being a student again.