Dreaming Into the Future: The Stories of Two ELL Programs

By Lori Grace, ELL Outlook™ Contributing Writer

Students' names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Known as the "Immigrant City," Lawrence, Massachusetts was built as an industrial metropolis in the 1840s and has been home to Irish, French-Canadians, English, Germans, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Syrians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Vietnamese, and Cambodians. Currently, Lawrence is composed of about 70,000 people, mostly of Hispanic origin. The city is full of dreams of creating a new life in America.

At Lawrence High School, two vital ESL programs exist for immigrant students who dream of that new life and come to live in the United States: the Newcomer program, for students between the ages of 13 and 20 who have just arrived in the country; and the Diploma Plus program, available to students at risk for dropping out of school for a variety of reasons.

Laurie Hartwick, an ESL teacher in the Diploma Plus program, says the program is 95% successful. Vulnerable students are given individualized attention, a personalized learning environment, and an opportunity to make a connection between the classroom and the outside world. According to the program guidelines, Diploma Plus is meant to teach students to be flexible, to adapt, and to revise their plans as needed, in order to develop the "habits of mind" necessary to go out into the world and be successful.

Guidance counselors advise students into the Diploma Plus program; those students may be about to drop out because they have too many absences, have court or probation issues, or are pregnant. The five teachers in the program find teaching there very worthwhile. It is challenging from day to day, but Hartwick says excitedly that this year, 4 of the 13 students graduating are going on to college.

I ask Hartwick about student experiences of the program, and she says, "They range depending on the strategies [students] need to develop to survive." Faculty experiences also range. "It feels so crazy sometimes" trying to help students pass their MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) tests, which are required for high school graduation. The students in the program have very divergent needs, and although teachers can provide more individualized attention and attend to their needs in a differentiated way, it is still difficult.

I pursue the question of how the MCAS is affecting students and teachers, and Hartwick says, "We are forced to offer enough MCAS prep for them to do the test. There is at least one MCAS-focused class a day, some of which are for the specific core courses, and others are for the general MCAS." One of the most frustrating and difficult issues regarding the English portion of the MCAS test is the need for students to be exposed to literature, much of which is meaningless to the students since it is so culturally different from their own experiences.

Hartwick says, "The greatest job at the end of each of the years is to re-fortify the notion that the students can make it and then to help them go on in the future." She suggests I speak more with ESL teacher Jodi Templar from the Newcomer program, who attends to ESL students at the outset of their stay in Lawrence, and who is partly responsible for getting students into the high school.

The goal of the Newcomer program is to prepare students for work in the high school, and it has mixed results. But those who do succeed come back to visit, and this fact thrills Jodi Templar. Leonardo, a successful graduate of the Newcomer program, visits the high school from the Lawrence campus of Northern Essex Community College to tell students in the program to be sure to pay attention and to stay in school. He says he wants them to have the same dynamic experience he has had. He now looks forward to the possibility of going on to Merrimack College, which offers a mentoring program and a full scholarship for hard-working students.

Templar says she is gratified to see him again after he graduated from the high school two years ago. The Newcomer program prepared him for community college, as did the fact that he has what she calls strong "habits of mind," the term that is also used in the Diploma Plus program.

Ignacio is another success story; he graduated quickly from the Newcomer program and went on to finish training to work with his father, who is a plumber. Having a strong grasp of English will help him immensely in his work with his already-successful father. José is another student who went though the Newcomer program quickly and went on to Northern Essex; he will be graduating soon.

Recalling a few other students who have gone on to Northern Essex Community College, Templar's mood lightens. For her, they demonstrate how well students can do when they are motivated. But she also worries about the ones who don't make it. "Some of the students with low academic success in school have special needs," she says. "They are just not that motivated. The lower-group students tend to be 'on the lam' or they just want to work; they are often running from a gang. Those students often drop out of school to work, or they withdraw to go back to their own country. This year we have lost about twenty. The numbers are growing every year."

Templar continues: "They realize, you know, we've told them, they have to pass MCAS, and that it takes a good two to three years for their English skills to get to a level to be able to do that. In addition they have to pass two regular English classes at the high school . . . the older kids come and they are told, they are counseled, this is how old you are going to be when you get your diploma. . . . A lot them come over to work and not go to school. So once they start working, they drop out and start working full-time." With no diploma and limited English skills, they are less likely to have the kind of future they may have dreamed of having when they were in their home countries.

The number of students in the Newcomer program has grown immensely in the past two years, and the program currently has 137 students and six teachers. Templar says, "We must have gotten 160 new ones throughout the [current academic] year." She seems overwhelmed with the numbers of students who keep coming into the high school, adding that it has been rumored that next year the high school will have split sessions to accommodate the numbers.

Because the number of students has grown so much in the past two years, it has been difficult to find a space in which to locate the program. The high school building was constructed for 1,200 students, and as of next year there will be more than 3,000 in the school. There are plans for a new school, scheduled for completion in February of 2007. Apparently, the high school will be located on a 25-acre campus and it will have six different buildings, each dedicated to a different field of study. This design, the "academy" model, has been successfully used with at-risk urban students around the country.

With the new school not yet completed, however, there was a need to move the Newcomer program to a different site. As Templar says, "The problem in Lawrence is that our building is very old and our program grew too fast. We got too many kids, so we were moved to another building." The Newcomer students are now housed in a building away from the main high school campus, upstairs from some of Lawrence's alternative school programs. Downstairs are the students who are in 45-day suspension for things like drugs, physical assault, weapons, and sexual assault. Also downstairs is the Second Opportunity Academy, comprised of teens who are just out of lock-up; there is another program called the Therapeutic High School, which is for teens who have psychiatric issues and could be in a residential program.

That mix means that there are sometimes problems among the various students. They fight with each other, and there is stalking, harassment, and conflicts among the groups of students, which can make it difficult for them to focus. Vulnerable students are prey to being beaten up or harassed. Last year one of the girls whom Templar described as "needy" was involved in a violent fight that was the result of jealousy and betrayal among girls.

Additionally, according to Templar, family configuration is important. "There are a lot of behavior problems; a lot of [students] are . . . sent over here without two parents. The ones that have intact families do very well. But the majority of the students come over and they don't have two parents; some of them live with an aunt, or there is the one parent who sent for them, and that parent may work second shift and not see the kids. So we have a lot, a lot of behavior problems: in and out of school, girls getting pregnant, people getting drunk. You get a lot of sad stories. They are not supervised." Ultimately these problems can get in the way of students' academic focus.

"We just lost three siblings who had to withdraw from school and move back to the Dominican Republic. They had waited for years to get visas and recently acquired them. The parents were divorced and the three kids came to live with their father. But because the father had to work odd hours and wasn't available to supervise the kids well, the kids had excessive absences and were going to be expelled from school."

The oldest son from that family worked at the notorious "fruit factory," a sweatshop that pays well but has terrible working conditions. He was attempting to bring in cash for the family, but that didn't help matters. The deplorable working conditions and the difficult hours at the factory can mean that students go to bed so tired they don't get up for school in time for classes.

But then Templar shifts the conversation back to the students in her program who are doing well. With pride in her voice, she says that some of the kids are "crackerjack" and are able to move from the program into the high school in six months. "Last year we had one young girl named Yeshi who was excellent. She always seemed to want to do extra work, was always eager to learn, and she always wanted to go above and beyond. She may be going on the ARC [Another Route to College] program at Northern Essex Community College . . . she did do very well." According to Templar, about half of the students in the Newcomer program do very well right away. She attributes this to student motivation, suggesting that students with intact families and good "habits of mind" are the ones most likely to succeed.

For Templar, the most energizing aspect of her job are the students who move on to trades or to college. She used to work at Northern Essex Community College, and we discuss some students who had been at the high school and are now at Northern Essex. They are working, raising children, and focusing, even after having endured personal challenges such as witnessing a father being imprisoned, seeing a brother shot, watching a mother die, or having a baby at age fifteen.

The phrase "that's not fair" is not often uttered by the students who go on to the community college level in Lawrence. Acceptance is a far more natural psychological state in this environment. That, and well-founded pride about the possibility of stepping into their dreams.

If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.