A small but growing number of kids entering Denver and Aurora schools need more help than learning English as they sit in American classrooms for the first time. In some cases, newcomer students — often refugees or refugee-eligible children — start school in the Denver area after years of interrupted education and may need help learning how to hold a pencil or how to sit in a class listening to a teacher all day.
The growth is slow, but both districts are increasing services — Denver Public Schools will open newcomer classrooms at two more schools in the fall, and Aurora Public Schools is in its first year of operating a welcome center.
“I think that there are specific needs that refugees might need addressing to be successful, but it might be the same case for some immigrant populations,” said Kit Taintor, the state’s refugee coordinator for the Office of Economic Security.
In Aurora, the school district budgeted about $600,000 to get its services running with the city’s new welcome center this summer to provide orientation for students and parents new to a U.S. school.
Nonprofit organizations that rent space from the district to run the city’s welcome services pay the district $2,600 per month, half of that in services.
“We provide information important for the families to know from Day One, no matter where they come from,” said Silvia Tamminen the coordinator for Aurora Public Schools’ welcome center. “We talk about the school calendar, the flow of the school day. We talk about, for middle and high school, how kids have to change classrooms. A lot of things that are very different in other countries.”
Denver Public School officials are opening two newcomer centers this fall to serve students from grades six through 12 in specific classrooms that teach students English while getting them used to the culture. Each center, on average, is budgeted to start with about $192,000 to cover two teachers and two paraprofessionals, or about $5,050 per student to cover a number of services.
Denver schools have newcomer centers at Merrill Middle School and South High School. Two Denver elementary schools also operate newcomer centers, including Isabella Bird Community School, which opened last year.
“Where we see the need is in the far northeast of Denver and the southwest right now,” said Jorge Robles, executive director for the English Language Acquisition department. “The nearest newcomer center is far away from those families.”
The four newcomer centers are serving 336 DPS students, including more than 30 students at the elementary center that opened last year. Identification of newcomer students in Denver is done at each school, so it’s unclear how many are across the district outside of the newcomer centers.
But just looking at the immigrant population, defined as any students not born in the United States, the number of those students in DPS went up by 19 percent in the past year.
In Aurora, the district’s population of refugee students is 1,581 (3.7 percent of the current population), up from 1,114 (2.8 percent) five years ago.
Officials in Jefferson County Public Schools and Adams 12 Five Star Schools said they have so few newcomer students that they don’t have specific programming for them. Instead, teachers work with the students to give them extra assistance for learning English.
The numbers haven’t increased sharply in Colorado, Taintor said, but the services DPS provides are designed for smaller groups, district officials say. Some school leaders have asked the district for help, as students who could be served in the newcomer centers are enrolling at schools closer to where they might live.
Louise H. Kreuzer, an elementary newcomer teacher in Denver, said it helps students to have a transition period through the program so they can get more attention before being put in larger classes.
“If they’re mainstreamed right away, the resources aren’t there,” said Kreuzer, who is researching refugee education and publishing a book. “It really is impossible to work with a student one-on-one all day.”
Kreuzer said teachers in the newcomer centers get to cater their instruction to the group’s needs. If students were mainstreamed, one who may not know the alphabet could end up in a fourth-grade class with 25 other students.
In Aurora, a teacher at the center provides tutoring to older students who are significantly farther behind their age group.
The center’s staff also works with teachers to provide training on the needs of newcomer students.
For some children, the work is about teaching them to look a teacher in the eye or to shake a person’s hand or, in some cases, teaching a student how to hold a pencil and take notes during class.
“It’s a lot more hands-on, easing them into our society in a way that’s healthy and doesn’t stir up any traumatic stress,” Kreuzer said. “Our kids just come with a different range of expectations, parental expectations and social norms.”
Teachers who understand students can help them feel comfortable with their identity while they prepare to enter mainstream classrooms, where they likely will feel the same pressures as all students, officials say.
“They understand these kids might need something different,” Taintor said. “But at the end of the day, they’re kids.”
Yesenia Robles: 303-954-1372, yrobles@denverpost.com or @yeseniarobles
