CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Buses line the driveway of an after-school program for immigrant and refugee children in Charlotte every day starting at 3 p.m. Children from kindergarten to eighth grade get off the bus and enter the building. Inside, you will have the opportunity to eat and relax before starting activities to improve your English skills.
Enrollment in ourBRIDGE for Kids program has grown over the past few years, from 35 students when it opened in 2014 to about 230 children in 2023, with more children enrolled on the waiting list. More than half of the children speak Spanish, but it is also common to hear conversations in the hallways in Dari, Pashto, Russian and other languages.
To participate in BRIDGE for Kids, students must meet one simple requirement: This means you must attend classes during regular school hours before you arrive. But in 2020, as more and more children stopped attending school during the pandemic, ourBRIDGE decided to expand its focus.
In addition to running after-school programs, staff and volunteers have begun working with families to address issues with children not logging in to online classes or showing up to the school building. The school district has recognized the impact. While other students in Charlotte were chronically absent, children at ourBRIDGE stayed connected to school.
“We realized that before explaining why your child isn't going to school, you need to ask, 'What are you worried about now?' This question opens up all the reasons why going to school is not a top priority for many families: housing insecurity, food insecurity, unemployment,” said Sil Ganzó, the program’s founder and executive director, who immigrated from Argentina 20 years ago.
Before 2020, school attendance rates for English language learners nationwide were high. In many schools, these students were more likely to attend class than other groups.
But that changed when schools closed and classes went virtual.
The number of students who are chronically absent, typically defined as missing more than 18 days in a school year, has surged since the pandemic, and the problem is even more severe among English language learners.
In California, chronic absenteeism among English language learners was only 10% in 2019. By 2022, that percentage had more than tripled to 34%. Similar trends have been reported in other states. Last year, 40% of Colorado's English language learners were chronically absent, 10 percentage points higher than their share of the overall student population.
The problem is similar in Charlotte, a community with a rapidly growing immigrant population and the highest percentage of English language learners in North Carolina. Even before the pandemic, the percentage of chronically absent English learners more than doubled, from 16% in 2019 to 36% in 2022.
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Although these numbers improved slightly in 2023, nearly one in three English language learner students are still chronically absent from school, and the overall student absence rate has decreased to one in four.
Joshua Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies chronic absenteeism, said that overall, many students are chronically absent for the same reasons they were before the pandemic, including illness, being out of school, unstable housing and transportation. . But the pandemic has exacerbated these problems.
“The existing inequalities surrounding students going to school have increased,” Childs said. “Our school system is not adequately prepared for disruption or a different model of schooling.”
This lack of preparation is even more evident in education for English language learners. Across the country, schools have struggled to deliver remote curriculum in other languages, and translation services have faltered under the strain of virtual learning. And teachers had difficulty explaining the logistics of remote learning through translators, a report from the Office of Civil Rights detailed.
A study conducted in Virginia found that schools are also having trouble keeping track of English language learners during this time. And a report from a federal watchdog on the challenges faced by English language learners found, for example, a district that mailed workbooks home to students in English and Spanish to help Spanish-speakers access the online learning curriculum. presented. But these efforts did nothing to help students who speak any of the other 90 languages spoken in the district.
Amid these challenges, ourBRIDGE for Kids has discovered that it can fill some of these gaps.
The after-school program, which Ganzó started in 2014, now has more than 36 staff members and more than 100 volunteers. The center leases its main campus for $1 from the Methodist retirement community and operates additional programs out of the elementary school.
Over the past few years, the group has hired several staff members to lead new family services programs.
“We realized that we needed to help families solve these problems and provide stability so that children could actually go to school,” Ganzó said. Volunteers helped connect them to resources when parents lost their jobs, delivered groceries to students' homes, and served as a call center when families needed help navigating the online learning system.
Due to its success, the Charlotte School District hired ourBRIDGE to help track down English language learners who were not attending school. Although Charlotte uses a small portion of ESSER funding to help pay for services, the overwhelming majority of ourBRIDGE funding comes from donations and grants. Services provided to families and students are free.
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Nadja Trez, director of learning and language acquisition for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, said the district contacted ourBRIDGE when staff noticed the positive effect the group was having on students and their families.
“I reached out first and said, ‘I need your help,’” said Trez, who also partners with the nonprofit Latin American Coalition for similar services.
The district's English learner population grew significantly last year, from 27,405 students to 30,151. And for the first time in many years, the language makeup of students is changing. In previous years, the most spoken languages in Charlotte schools were Spanish and Vietnamese, Trez said. The school now welcomes many Russian-speaking people, including refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. In total, students in the district speak 194 different languages.
But it is difficult for schools to track families in every community, and families often have needs that go beyond what schools can provide.
“Many multilingual students, especially students at the high school level, find themselves in situations they have no control over,” Trez said.
When ourBRIDGE contacted one family whose student did not attend class, the group learned that the absences were due to a number of frustrations. Both parents had been fired from their jobs, their youngest child had recently suffered a medical emergency requiring surgery, and the owner of the apartment they lived in had filed paperwork to evict them. The after-school program connected families with organizations that provide crisis emergency funding to low-income families and attended court hearings with them to help with translation. The family was able to save the money they needed and stay in their home.
Another absent student ourBRIDGE identified had a chronic illness and his family did not know how to submit a medical excuse to the online portal.
“A big part of what we do is say, ‘You need to speak up on issues,’” said Yeferline Gomez, a family support manager with ourBRIDGE. “It is your right to know these things. It’s your right to ask questions, and it’s your right to translate it in a way you can understand.”
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Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has its own team that knocks on doors to find students who have been absent from class for extended periods of time. But Brian Harris, a Spanish-speaking social worker for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, said it can be difficult for schools to gain trust from families who speak a different language and are new to the country.
“When I show up at the door, I always represent something that is not good for the Latino population. I am a tall white man. “I look and sound like an immigration officer or a police officer,” Harris said. “Once you gain their trust, you gain their trust. You come in and it’s like you’re family. And when you knock on their door, they will answer. But it will take some time to get there.”
One of the reasons for ourBRIDGE's success is a simple change to the program a few years ago. This means that we do not communicate with our families through translators. Instead, we hire staff and volunteers who are immigrants and speak the same language. When new students arrive who speak a language not spoken by current staff, the program strives to hire someone who can communicate with them.
“There was day and night. This is because parents have established trusting relationships and shared experiences with people from the same country,” Ganzó said. “They come to the event and we all have a relationship with them, but they know someone who speaks their language will be there and it’s not someone else every time.”
On a Thursday in December, third- and fourth-grade students sat at six tarp-covered tables on ourBRIDGE's main campus, up to their elbows painted with mud in red, green, yellow, and a combination of all three.
Some people were excitedly talking to each other in Spanish, while others were drawing with their fingers.
Flags of various countries hang from the ceilings of campus halls and classrooms, and the entrance has large letters reading “Diversity” across from a picture of a woman wearing a hijab. Teaching English to students who are new to the country is just one goal of ourBRIDGE; another is to make them feel welcome and celebrate their traditions.
“We want them to feel proud of their background, culture, traditions, language and accent as they learn English and become accustomed to life in the United States,” Ganzó said.
This story about ourBridge for Kids was produced by: Hechinger Reportis a nonprofit, independent media outlet focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up Hechinger Newsletter.