A helping hand for migrant students

A nonprofit organization, the Internationals Network for Public Schools, delivers a first-class education to the children of illegal immigrants, helping to break the cycle of poverty and provide them a path to advance in life.

World Relief Durham hosts a summer program for kids. Like other summer programs, it is meant to reduce summer learning loss—but this is specifically for children from forcibly displaced families. The kids face unique challenges in school and in society, often having been witness to traumatic experiences, so in this program they take lessons, play games, and work with community volunteers to let them just be kids. The program started with 25 participants in 2017 and grew to serve 150 children in 2019.

A school in Tel Aviv welcomes immigrant and refugee children with open arms, providing language classes, long school days, extracurricular activities, and more. Members of the community volunteer to tutor and lead after-school courses, allowing children to learn while their parents work late. Now, more schools are popping up in Tel Aviv with similar aspirations.

Prince George's County in Maryland ranks fourth in the country for the number of unaccompanied students with sponsors. Often, these students have experienced a lot of trauma by the time they arrive at school. School officials are using their budget to spend it on resources to help educators and undocumented students succeed academically by hiring trauma specialists, bilingual liaisons, and teacher aides. “The most important reason is it is morally, really spiritually, inappropriate to mistreat the children who come from these families and not give them equal opportunity.”

In stark contrast with their Slovakia homeland, England has opened its arms to Roma immigrants with a set of accommodations aimed at helping them succeed in their new country. Victims of racism in both places, but particularly among Slovaks, the Roma newly arrived in England receive health counseling and educational aid that have inclusion at their core. Britain's school-attendance policies, for example, have increased Roma children's attendance by 30 percentage points, and few are shunted into special schools.

In the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis, Germany has managed to integrate more than 1.2 million men, women, and children into schools and workplaces around the country. Although the learning curve is steep, refugees learn both language and cultural skills to help them adapt to their new life, and families are welcomed into makeshift homes while the government works to build new housing structures.

The ecosystem of D.C. charter schools that has evolved over the last two decades represents a cornucopia of creative and nontraditional approaches to education, in addition to fairly traditional college-prep schools, and is now producing some of the highest graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and average test scores in public schools in the nation.

Through programs across the country, nurses, social workers, or trained mentors offer support to new or expectant parents, imparting skills to help them become better teachers for their children. Through regular home visits with the families, these programs are working to close an achievement gap between rich and poor children that starts as early as just nine months into a child's life.

Lincoln Literacy addresses language barriers for immigrants and refugees through a volunteer-based ESL program that offers over 100 classes across nine locations in Lincoln, Nebraska. The organization's model includes community classes, workplace partnerships where employers pay for on-site instruction during work hours and a student-centered curriculum that adapts to real-world communication needs. The group has been operating since 1975.

ourBRIDGE for Kids is a school-based program that helps English language learners improve their language skills. Since the pandemic increased rates of chronic absenteeism among English language learners, ourBridge shifted its focus to also provide family services to provide comprehensive support, like secure housing and grocery delivery, that helps keep youth in school.