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This is our opportunity to do right by young people by treating them humanely and providing them with school environments that are sanctuaries."

- Adria Padilla-Chavez

How educators are addressing the needs of “newcomer” students

Adria Padilla-Chavez’s classroom at Thornton High School in the Denver suburbs reveals, in many ways, the changing face of Colorado and many other parts of the country.

Padilla-Chavez, a doctoral student in the School of Education at 91������, teaches in the Adams 12 Five Star Schools’ Newcomer Center, which launched in fall 2023. It’s a one-year program for students who have just arrived in the United States.

International flags line the classroom walls, and signs read “You are welcome here” in multiple languages. Muslim students, many of whom settled in or around Thornton as refugees from Afghanistan, often greet Padilla-Chavez, who speaks Spanish, with “¿Cómo estás?” Students from Venezuela and Colombia, meanwhile, have learned about fasting for Ramadan. “Many of them have left so much of their family behind,” Padilla-Chavez said. “So, we’ve cultivated a really beautiful community where they’ve become each other’s family.”

In Colorado, that community is growing larger.

Over the past school year, districts across the state enrolled thousands of children who were new to the United States—many of them from Central and South America. By April, Denver Public Schools’ superintendent, himself a child of immigrants, estimated that the district alone had opened its doors to more than 3,500 newcomers and that “meeting the moment” was a moral imperative. By the end of the school year, Colorado lawmakers passed a bill appropriating one-time funds to schools that enrolled newly arrived students after the pupil enrollment count date in October—an important relief measure that came after day-to-day strains in classrooms.

Silvia Noguerón-Liu is an associate professor of literacy studies. She said that throughout Colorado, many teachers were already buckling under the strain of overseeing large class sizes and tailoring their instruction to students with different needs. In her own recent visits to classrooms, she noticed that teachers were managing even more concerns.

“We got a lot of new arrivals in the winter when the school year had already begun,” she said. “It’s really cold. They need winter clothing. They need to learn how to handle snow, how the school system works, what happens every day.”

Noguerón-Liu spearheads a group of faculty members and students from the School of Education who are helping local educators meet the needs of these newcomers. They’re developing educational resources to assist teachers in communicating with students who are learning English and navigating U.S. culture and schools. At the same time, Noguerón-Liu acknowledges that teachers need more support as they contend with a multitude of challenges—such as how to take care of their own mental health while working with youth who have experienced trauma.

With the new school year underway, she and her colleagues urge teachers to see newcomer students as an opportunity to enrich public education in Colorado for all students.

Observed Padilla-Chavez, “This is our opportunity to do right by young people by treating them humanely and providing them with school environments that are sanctuaries.”

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Electric spaces

Tania Hogan, executive director of the BUENO Center for Multicultural Education in the School of Education, sees herself in the newcomer students. She was 5 years old when her family moved from Acapulco, Mexico, to the suburbs of Philadelphia.

Hogan was a painfully shy child, and at school she tried everything she could to hide the fact that she couldn’t speak English: She rarely talked in class and learned how to mimic what other kids were doing.��

It wasn’t until fourth grade that one of Hogan’s teachers, Mr. Phillips, took an interest in her. He encouraged her to read and wrote her motivating letters, which he continued to do even after Hogan’s family moved out of state.

“I learned to read in his class and became obsessed with reading,” Hogan said. “I could not put books down after that.”

She wants teachers to know that, like her as a child, newcomer students bring a lot of strengths and knowledge with them.

“They have so many assets already present,” Hogan said. “People often assume newcomer students are coming in as blank slates, but that’s not true. As educators, it’s our job to figure out their hidden talents and build on them.”

Padilla-Chavez said that one of her students is a master fisherman, and others are experts at trading goods in a crowded market.

“The desire to learn within the newcomer center is electric,” she said. “They have knowledge systems and experiences beyond what the U.S. school system can imagine or even measure.”

Deena Gumina, an assistant teaching professor in the Sch