Since last January, at least 41,000 people have migrated to the Denver metro area. Denver has long been an attractive destination for recent migrants, but this significant number of newly arrived immigrants has created complex and novel challenges for the city. Part of what makes Denver attractive as a destination for newcomers is the city’s determination to provide support and safety for those who are living in the country without documentation. Although the metro area has been well-equipped to deal with the typical inflow of migrants, this recent and rapid influx of such a significant number of migrants has required both public and private institutions to respond quickly. Some of the most immediate and urgent needs include providing newly arrived migrants with basic accommodations like housing and food. An equally important, but perhaps less obvious, concern is ensuring children in newly arrived families have access to educational opportunities. Communities in the Denver metro area have had to quickly develop and implement strategies that ensure schools are able to manage the increase in volume of students who have recently arrived from other countries.
Navigating Institutions
Community members noted that one of the big challenges new immigrants face is acquainting themselves with institutions that are not necessarily user friendly. Navigating the public school system already presents challenges for long-time residents, but the difficulty of this task can be compounded by a lack of familiarity with how the public school system works in the United States. Sometimes, this lack of familiarity can result in a lack of engagement, leaving children in newly arrived families unenrolled and unaccounted for by the educational system. Several community members noted that integrating new residents into the public school system may require an active effort on the part of public officials and community liaisons. Community members noted that not only is it critical that newly arrived families are made aware of how to interact with the school system, they must feel empowered to be able to advocate for their children within the schools. Having the ability to advocate for their children’s needs may help newly arrived families experience community while also helping ensure that students of migrant families are able to acquire the resources they need to advance their education. One community member who had the experience of navigating universities as a first generation college attendee noted that having a helping hand during the early stages of interacting with school systems can help one feel as though they are a desired member of the community and not a burden. As he explained, many longtime residents have a pre-existing and somewhat intuitive familiarity with the educational institutions, but trying to navigate school systems without that experience can be alienating and somewhat intimidating. As he put it, “you already have to step into whatever you want to do educationally with this baseline level of knowledge of where something and someone is, and if you don’t, then it’s a huge mental barrier. Like, ‘oh, obviously you don’t want me here’.” Several community members noted that it is critical that recently arrived families feel like they are welcomed and accepted members of the community and this requires that they are not simply left to navigate foreign systems on their own.
Not only are these newly arrived families encountering a new set of educational institutions, like American K-12 public schools, they also are encountering a new set of institutions which manage political life in their new home. Community members noted that it is important for recent immigrants to learn how to navigate political life in the United States and suggested that schools are a particularly useful vehicle for transmitting that type of knowledge. One former educator, who also had the experience of being a newly arrived migrant, noted that her experience shaped her awareness of the importance of teaching her community of students about democracy. As she put it, “I think schools have, I see it as an obligation, and its students have a right to learn how to engage in an inclusive democracy in order for them to be successful citizens and individuals.”
Not only can public schools put information regarding civic duties and privileges in the hands of young people who could very well live most of their lives in the United States, community members pointed out that students in schools are attached to others who may also benefit from encountering this knowledge and utilizing these resources. Public schools, because they often are so deeply embedded in community networks, are uniquely situated to provide critical information to many members of a community at once. One mother noted that her experience with Head Start helped her realize the importance of thinking of students in relation to other members of their community, as opposed to thinking of them as individual silos. As she put it, “As a former Head Start mom, I really believe in the Head Start model. I think it works really well. Every student is the extension of the immediate family but also a community and culture. Allowing that environment where we see them as the entire entity of a community is important. They’re representing a huge portion of people. That’s not to say we place pressure or weight on our students, but rather to say we should open up environments that are as supportive of their parents and family members as we are supportive of them.”
For many community members, it is important that public schools serve as a site for civic education, so that newly arrived migrants can be made aware of the available means for participation in politics. Not only does providing a civic education provide the opportunity for students at public schools to understand the political system, it can allow entire communities to acquire widespread awareness of how they can exercise political power. Ensuring residents have the know-how to be effective participants in a democracy, suggested community members, is a necessary component of ensuring new families feel fully incorporated in their community and school.
Encountering New Culture – laws
Financial stressors can be particularly impactful on newly arrived families, making the pursuit of income paramount. In recognition of this, community members also noted that recent migrants may be unfamiliar with norms and laws regarding educational institutions that may not have been as prevalent or enforced in their home countries. For instance, it may be useful for some families to be made aware that in the United States, students have to attend school for a certain amount of time out of the year. Due to the country’s labor laws, there are restrictions on the types of work children can do and the ability of children to earn income in lieu of attending school regularly. This dynamic makes it even more important for households to be made aware of the requirement of school attendance for those under 16 years old.
As a mother of a DPS student put it, “We need money to survive. To be able to get your basic necessities, you need money. At the same time, and I can’t say that I know the education systems in other countries. But knowing that in the United States, by law, you need to have your students enrolled and attending school is important. Going back to what should they know–they should know that by law their student needs to be going and attending school, and we have child labor laws and we’re hopeful that they’re followed. But it’s a hard thing because you’re not in that family’s shoes for you to come and dictate, ‘this is what you need to be doing.’ We can only advise them from the heart, and give them resources, and make them aware of what is available to them.”
Linguistic justice
Although language barriers can make communication difficult, community members were clear that linguistic differences should not become an impediment to inclusion in the public school system. Schools in the metro area have largely focused their efforts on catering to students who speak Spanish. However, one interesting element of the recent uptick in migrants is the fact that it has included people who speak a plethora of different languages. Importantly, though, as several community members noted, the metro area has long had a wide array of languages present in the public school systems. Several former educators noted that this dynamic is particularly pronounced in Aurora, despite it also being quite prevalent in Denver proper. Enabling participation within the school system for those who speak languages other than English, according to one community member, is central to dismantling elements of colonialism and white supremacy within education. As she put it, “Everyone is expected to express themselves in a white standard, and not seeing students’ voices and cultures reflected especially within the linguistic components of school I think is an area that schools have to think about when we talk about colonialism and those different types of things that people are expected to do and just to have one perspective and one voice and us having to assimilate to that especially as people of color. One example I’m thinking of, when you think about African immigrants as one example, their languages are never really represented and even when they don’t necessarily identify as Black Americans, we don’t think about the different types of diasporas they represent. When I think about the southwest, people want to only associate differences with people who speak Spanish or come from Spanish backgrounds, but we have a large Asian American, especially Vietnamese population, and are those languages represented? It’s just something to think about in terms of that idea of decolonising.”
For all residents to be adequately served by the school system, community members stressed that it is important that both students and families can communicate with teachers and administrators, irrespective of the language they speak. Community members suggested that ensuring language differences do not keep migrants from being able to interact with schools is a matter of justice and fairness. Integrating migrant families into the existing school system will require that all students and families have the ability to learn inside classrooms and communicate with the school outside of instruction time. Creating an environment where speaking a language other than English is not an impediment to interacting with the public school system would require an expansion of existing translational services as well as an increase in the number of district employees who are multilingual.
Integrating such a significant number of new families who come from all parts of the world into the educational system is going to require a commitment to accommodating and empowering new residents. Public schools in particular are going to have to organize resources in such a way that new students are integrated into the educational system as seamlessly as possible. However, as community members note, these new families are not only in need of resources, their integration into the school system provides an opportunity for students and families to collaborate with and potentially improve existing institutions. Integrating migrant families in the community allows for these families to learn more about how things like education works in the Denver metro area, and also for Denver residents to learn more about these families and their immigration journey. Perhaps most importantly, community members stressed the urgency of response, noting that political disputes and other ideological divisions must be put aside in light of the gravity of this moment.
There has long been discussion about challenging educational practices which entrench and normalize harmful social phenomena like Eurocentrism, classism and racism however, many feel that promoting positive change has been an uphill battle. Many community members have felt that the educational system has been unable to demonstrate an ability to incorporate a multitude of perspectives when establishing priorities and protocols for schools in the Denver Metro area.
The recent influx of migrants into the Denver Metro area might provide the impetus and opportunity for educational practices to be rethought in ways that would improve the school experience. Although addressing community needs in light of this dynamic will present significant challenges, some community members believe meeting the demands of this moment will provide an opportunity for the public schools to improve in meaningful and permanent ways.
Reframing the Discussion
Much of the discussion regarding the newcomers to the city revolves around what migrants need, and therefore tends to focus on what they lack. Focusing on what migrants bring with them to their new homes highlights how the presence of these new residents can positively impact the metro area. As one DPS alum whose grandfather had immigrated to the country put it, “even in my mind, I’m looking at them like they’re coming here with nothing but they’re not coming with nothing. They’re people. I know even from my grandfather, he was a teacher, he had a master’s degree in mathematics but when he came he worked in a factory predominantly using his hands, he didn’t become an engineer or something like that.
That always rattles my mind. Just because you’re not born here, you have to be blue collar.”
Particularly intriguing was the way community members thought an influx of international students could allow for added complexity regarding how we approach abstract concepts like democracy, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism in the educational system. If students are frequently in contact with peers who have ties and experiences elsewhere, perhaps they will grow to understand themselves as a part of an enlarged global community. As one former educator, who is an immigrant herself put it, “I think schools will benefit from the perspective immigrants bring from all over the world because democracy is lived differently depending on where you are so it adds to the concept of democracy that we already have and I think school has the opportunity to enhance the democratic concepts we already have to make it more inclusive.” Another person echoed that statement noting that an increase in diversity, particularly an increase in international perspectives would enhance students’ ability to understand that dominant domestic political and social practices are not necessarily highly prevalent throughout the world and are definitely not the only way of doing things. He noted, for instance, that students could benefit from learning that “the way we do things here is not the only way to do things. There are a lot of ways to do life and multiple ways of doing democracy.”
Not only might the recent increase in migrants provide insight into alternative views of political and social life, it might also invigorate the ongoing effort to dismantle elements of the school system which obfuscate or tacitly promote perspectives which endorse colonialism and other forms of oppression. One educator noted that this moment provides the opportunity for academic spaces to facilitate conversations which are grounded in the actual experiences of those in the classroom. She noted that the opportunity to conduct this type of dialogue with students is particularly important regarding experiences of oppression. She suggested that this moment provides the opportunity for communities in the metro area to “engage in the conversation about what colonialism has done and continues to do in our school systems, so that schools can engage in that conversation with all the immigrants and migrants that come to the United States and give them the chance to dig deeper into the internalized oppression we carry with us because we encounter colonialism especially in education.”
Curriculum
Also, the influx of students who are not from the United States will result in an increase in the number of students who don’t speak English as their first or only language. Many community members welcome this tension because it can help reorient the way we think about linguistic diversity in K-12 education more generally. One community member noted that Americans are particularly regressed in relation to the rest of the world in terms of language adoption.
Many Americans only speak one language, and perhaps more importantly, many Americans do not consider learning multiple languages a basic aspect of becoming educated.
“It makes me think a lot about other educational systems and how dual language learners or bilingualness is such a globally accepted normal high standard of education. It’s a high value. Yet and still in the United States, in our educational system, it is not something we have integrated fully. Even as much ESL stuff as we’ve done, we’re not a bilingual country, and so how do we change the culture that historically has been the United States educational system… How do we shift those very European-centric aspects of that? It makes me think of that, so how do we shift towards bilingualism being the standard, not the option? What we’re seeing right now is a lot of bilingual programs being gentrified because of the way they are being accessed, the way that they are being offered, where they are being placed and what school districts or what schools or what neighborhoods of affluence. So that makes me wonder how do we make more of the global standard of education ours and that does include much more diversity, linguistically and otherwise.”
Not only might having the ability to speak multiple languages put American students on par with their peers from other countries, it may also pay dividends in terms of their intellectual development. One educator noted that she often sees an increased aptitude for creative ways of proving points and argumentation when working with students who speak multiple languages. She suggests that we leave a lot on the table in terms of developing critical thinking skills when we do not prioritize learning multiple languages. As she noted, “education as a whole misses out on the power of being bilingual and what it does for thinking and critical thinking.”
She went on to note that shifting towards a curriculum with an increased focus on learning languages can help mitigate the harm experienced by being divorced from one’s native tongue. Privileging English, she said, not only limits opportunities to experience the benefits of learning multiple languages, but it also can serve as a coded means to denigrate other languages and the speakers of those languages. Another community member, who is the child of Spanish-speaking immigrants, noted that she feels that ‘no sabo kids’ were often harmfully divorced from their linguistic heritage. ‘No Sabo kids’ have recently been a topic of conversation as they represent a cohort of kids who were not taught to speak Spanish largely due to the notion that teaching children Spanish would reduce their opportunities for career success and social acceptance later in life. The inability to communicate with other Spanish speakers can lead to a sense of overall estrangement from the Spanish-speaking community. This, in turn, can cause a sort of crisis in identity. But some of this could be avoided, she thinks, if parents didn’t see learning Spanish as an impediment to doing well in school or being accepted into the broader community.
Moreover, many community members suggested that the gravity of this moment may allow for a deeper overhaul of the curriculum in school. As one parent of a student in the metro area noted, “We just haven’t restructured since its [the curriculum] inception. This has been the thing. This is what has been done and so, therefore, we are still doing. It needs to change. It definitely needs to change.” She had recently worked on a state task force which develops recommendations meant to help integrate work-based learning opportunities with high-school and college programs.
Several other community members noted that migrants may be interested in pursuing adjustments to the curriculum that would result in schools being more focused on professional preparedness. Many noted that this desire was aimed at both blue and white collar work. However, there were a variety of different perspectives regarding whether or not most migrant families wanted their children to pursue higher education or forgo additional schooling in service of obtaining additional income. Interestingly, many community members who were first or second generation noted that these conflicting demands regarding education had deeply shaped their relationship to school.
What Now?
Fundamentally, many community members hoped that the current migrant situation might allow for the educational system in the metro area to address long-standing areas of concern at a more foundational level. It seems, at the core of this proposition, was the idea that an influx of new and foreign students might finally force the educational system to move beyond being a system that seems designed to foster success for only a fractional amount of the students.
As one DPS alum noted, “Being first generation myself I was the first to try the thing…I don’t like to say we have a broken educational system because the system was designed for a particular population, so it’s working just fine for them. They [recent migrants] need to learn you have a voice and you have a say.”
Opposing the values and practices that promote the tacit acceptance of things like Eurocentrism and classism, might be bolstered by the need to ensure that newly arrived migrants don’t find themselves ensnared in a system that feels unsupportive or hostile. Perhaps this situation provides the opportunity to change the school system so that it is more accommodating for all types of students. Such a desire, however, is not new and the arrival of the students in and of themselves does little to change the longstanding challenges that have stood in the way of such a significant change in the past.
No matter how well-intentioned, without adequate resources, efforts by school districts in the Denver metro area to handle the recent influx of migrant students may fall flat. According to many community members, in order for classrooms and schools to function well this coming school year, school districts will need to dedicate more resources to preparing schools and teachers for students that will be more linguistically and culturally diverse than ever. As districts in the metro area are already facing significant financial pressures, many community members are concerned about the ability of local schools to allocate adequate funding for things like additional teacher training, expanding translational services or increasing the number of multilingual faculty. Without these additional resources, teachers may become overwhelmed by the demands and complexities of carrying out day-to-day school operations, given the rapid influx of students who have recently arrived in the United States.
Resources
Perhaps the most important resources when it comes to schools are human resources because it is people after all, who do the teaching and handle the administrative duties. Community members, however, are aware that the response to the influx of migrants has to be handled by school districts that have long had trouble recruiting and retaining faculty and staff.
Not only do districts in the metro area need to recruit and retain additional teachers, they are especially in need of teachers who are culturally competent, racially diverse and multilingual. As one community member put it, “thinking back about my time working at schools, I think ‘we need teachers that are culturally ready for this, bilingual teachers’, like there’s a teacher shortage but bilingual teachers are even less seen in the classroom.”
In the metro area, figuring out how to recruit and retain teachers has long been a problem, and that has been particularly true for teachers of color. For many teachers of color, it is the additional and unaccounted for labor that comes along with their normal job duties that causes them to leave the profession.
These concerns are also shared by multilingual teachers, as they are often asked to shoulder additional duties, although that work is never formally recognized as a part of their job responsibilities. A community member that works in schools pointed out that “bilingual and multilingual teachers are asked to do a lot of free labor,” which prompted another community member who is an educator to suggest that the uneven distribution of labor “is not okay.” She went on to note, “you have so many teachers or people who are just being asked, ‘can you do this translation service? Can you communicate with this family?’ There’s just not enough investment in saying that providing translation is something we believe in as a school.”
Community members noted that much of the discourse surrounding the influx of migrant students is focused on issues regarding the curriculum, but often fails to address the underlying problem of under-funded schools. That lack of funding may explain the experience some teachers have of needing to reinvest a portion of their wages back into their classroom just to ensure their students have their basic needs met. For instance, one former educator noted that she has friends who are still in the classroom who come out of pocket to make sure basic items like tampons, toothbrushes, and soap are available to their students. Teachers throughout Colorado are already receiving salaries that barely track with the cost of living, add the possibility of reinvesting a portion of your wage into your classroom, and it may be enough to keep potentially interested parties from joining the profession. As one community member noted, “I do think it comes down to money, if we’re 45th in the nation in funding our schools… we’re not going to be able to recruit the best folks to become teachers and we’re not gonna be able to have teachers not be stressed out all the time and just barely making it.”
Despite the widespread awareness that there are simply not enough teachers to meet current demands, there seems to be an inability to implement changes which would increase the teacher workforce. Many community members believe that policy-makers have been slow to address the fundamental problems which have created our current teacher shortage. As one mother of DPS students noted, “We pay teachers so poorly. I know that we have legislation being drawn up to address the new influx of students, but also it’s like, when are we going to address the actual funding formula to make it any kind of equal playing field to address these basic issues of retention, incentivisation, if we’re talking about language justice is there some kind of bilingual or multilingual incentivisation for staff in such a high linguistically diverse district.”
On top of the underfunding, community members expressed concern about the allocation of resources in the metro area. For instance, one educator asked, “How are we going to protect our bilingual resources for those folks that actually need them now that we’re seeing the rise of literally gentrifying bilingual programs?” She noted that shifting demographics in the city often leave resources in the hands of student populations that were not necessarily their intended target, resources that could potentially benefit newcomer students.
Preparing Teachers
Several community members speculated that without proper training and additional resources, the exodus of teachers from the classroom will escalate due to the additional task of teaching many students who do not share a common language. As one current educator noted, “What you’re asking all teachers to do starts in new teacher training and making sure that it’s not separate. We always have conversations about what these best practices are for multilingual students and us not thinking about it like it’s wrapped, it’s not separate. You shouldn’t be going to a different session, it’s the same thing. Rethinking how we’ve been doing training for teachers is critical right now.” One former educator noted that part of the problem is that training is implemented in such a way that it doesn’t make clear to teachers how to best navigate multilingual classrooms. A current educator noted that, in his experience, professional development training sessions often involve being presented with so much information so quickly that it is not digestible and therefore not particularly useful. As he put it, “when you go to these trainings it feels like it’s just so much information coming at you, you just be like ‘I’m shutting down.’”
One former educator noted that, at times, teacher training has the unintended consequence of making it more difficult for teachers to respond well in the classroom. She said, “teachers are looking for that silver bullet and they forget to look inside themselves. Sometimes I feel like we’re doing to our teachers what we’re doing to our students. We’re not thinking about what are their gifts? What are their assets that you have that you already bring to the class and let’s expand. Let’s go from there.” There are no simple solutions for managing a classroom of any kind, let alone one that contains the complex dynamics that many classrooms in the metro area are soon to experience. However, holding space for teachers to explore how they can use their strengths to improve upon or invent novel strategies may allow for the teachers to develop the expertise and flexibility necessary to contend with novel challenges.
In the Classroom
Frankly, teaching in a classroom where students speak multiple languages is no easy task. One APS educator noted that there was a steep learning curve in his experience as a young teacher, even though the linguistic diversity in his classroom came nearly exclusively from Spanish-speaking students at the time. He noted that he eventually developed strategies like utilizing gestures, symbols and modeling to communicate when he couldn’t rely on oral instructions. Because he taught music, which he believes is a sort of universal language, he felt that he had an easier time teaching without necessarily sharing language with his students than many other teachers. He pointed out that much of his success can be attributed to trusting his intuitive feeling that the most important aspect of the classroom is its relational component. As he put it, “speaking as a teacher, my biggest thing is relationships. I want them to feel included. They are in a new environment. They’re scared. Chances are they don’t speak the same language.”
Another community member who had spent many years working in education noted that one complicating element of the recent influx of migrants is the proliferation of students who speak many languages in the classroom. Navigating this dynamic will put additional pressures on teachers, many of whom suggest they are already at max capacity in terms of managing the classroom. As he put it “if you’ve got 200 languages, what do you even do? especially without enough resources, it’s asking teachers to do one more thing and figure out how to navigate multiple languages in your classroom.”
Schools in the Denver metro area will be in the unique position of accommodating a significant portion of students who have recently arrived in the country. Doing so will require patience, innovation and an investment. Perhaps most importantly, school districts will have to put faculty and staff in a position to meet the demands of the moment and ensure that students have access to what they need to receive an education. As community members noted, in order to create an environment which is conducive to quality education, there will have to be an abundance of individuals within schools who are equipped to handle what is an interesting and developing situation regarding the rapid influx of migrant students. As one community member summarized it, “we’ve seen our state grow in its need. Right now we’re short on teachers, for example. We need those that have the passion and the education to be able to come back to our classrooms and teach our next generation.”
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Allan Tellis
Chief Writer, Denver
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