1 week Ago
Last month, the principal of Perkins K-8 regularly walked over to the tents in nearby César Chávez Park in Barrio Logan, where dozens of asylum-seeking migrants with nowhere else to go had been camping out. Fernando Hernandez and other staff members brought with them toiletries, towels — and school enrollment forms. The chance to enroll in school after months of traveling, uncertainty and danger was a relief and the first sign for many of these parents that they had achieved some sense of refuge, stability and consistency for their children.
It’s a chance for their children to make friends, learn new things and be a kid for the first time in months, many said. “I feel like she finally started living her childhood,” said Zulynel Ferrer, an asylum seeker from Venezuela, whose 7-year-old daughter attends second grade at Perkins. “She had to grow too fast.
” Thousands of migrant students attend San Diego Unified schools, a number that has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Perkins enrolled its first student from South America one year ago, Hernandez said. There are now several new students from Venezuela, while others are from Nicaragua and Colombia.
Almost 6,000 migrant students who have arrived in the U.S. within the last three years are currently attending San Diego Unified schools, according to district data.
Of those, about 3,100 have arrived in just the past year. The most common country of origin for newcomer migrant students in the district is Mexico, followed by Haiti, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Brazil and Vietnam. Scores of students are also from Chile, Venezuela, the Philippines and Ukraine.
More than half of the district’s migrant students don’t speak English. The most common languages they speak are Spanish, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese, Russian, Portuguese, Farsi and Tagalog. Many of these students come with several needs at once, including homelessness and mental health challenges.
And it often falls to the school to support their parents, too, in helping them find temporary housing, providing basic resources such as laundry and showers, and offering emotional support as families recuperate from traumas endured on their journeys here. “We’ve always had families live in cars, live in tents, but never this many at this one time just in one place,” Hernandez said of the park encampment. “The stress of living out in a public park with your young children .
.. I can’t imagine doing it myself.
” At Perkins, school staff are already used to supporting students who have suffered through crises — family violence, divorce, illness and deaths, as well as homelessness and hunger. Perkins teachers and staff work to support students by not just providing physical resources from food to deodorant to shoes, but emotional support — that might mean finding out why students are misbehaving before just meting out discipline, acting as a counselor in the classroom and developing supportive relationships with parents who are going through their own traumas. “We have to make our parents feel like each of them is valued,” Hernandez said.
“That’s the easiest and most important thing that we can create for them.” Ferrer, who left Venezuela with her family in 2018, can finally breathe again with her daughter back in school. “The stress is over.
The torment is over,” she said in Spanish. Ferrer, 28, and the family first tried to find a better life in Colombia. But they fled that country in December because of extortion and violence, she said.
Ferrer and her husband then made a treacherous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border with their daughters, 7 and 2, trekking through dangerous jungles and passing dead bodies.
They made it to San Diego, where they lived out of a tent in César Chávez Park for two months. Humanitarian groups stepped in by mid-August, helping families find shelters as the Port of San Diego warned that police would be soon clearing the encampment. Ferrer and her family moved to a homeless shelter, and the rest of the adult migrants left on their own.
But it was at the park that Ferrer learned about the school, and the principal later helped her enroll her daughter. At Perkins, Ferrer’s daughter does not speak English yet, but her classmates help her understand the teacher and do her homework. Now her daughter knows how to say numbers in English up to 12, and she knows most of the alphabet.
Her daughter gets up early on school days. What she learns in class is all she talks about, Ferrer said. “It’s been one blessing after another,” Ferrer said.
Ferrer never got the chance to graduate from college due to her economic situation. “For me, the most important thing is my daughter’s education,” she said through tears. “I do whatever it takes for her to go to school.
” Natacha Martínez, an asylum seeker from Venezuela, enrolled her two daughters at Perkins. But she’s found a way to start over there, as well. Martínez, 33, who was an early childhood teacher in her native country, now works as a noon-duty assistant at school.
“This school has given us a lot of opportunities,” she said. “They opened their doors to us.” She and her family arrived in San Diego in November after entering the country through CBP One, the web-based app used by asylum seekers to schedule an appointment for screening at a U.
S. port of entry. Before that, she had trekked through seven countries where she and her family faced “cold and calamity,” including in Mexico, where they were kidnapped and had to pay to be released, she said.
In San Diego, they struggled to find a place to stay. First, they lived in the lobby of a shelter that was over capacity. Then they camped in a local park with two other families in the Embarcadero area.
About three months later, and after moving several times, the family found refuge in a Father Joe’s shelter near the school. For Martínez and her daughters — Joharis is in sixth grade and Shamtall in eighth — one of the most arduous adjustments has been learning English. Nearly 40 percent of Perkins students were English learners last school year, meaning English isn’t spoken at home and they are not yet fluent in English.
That means teachers, who have two dozen or more students in class, often have several students who can’t understand their instruction. So teachers rely on other students, often asking a bilingual student to partner with the student learning English. Martínez enrolled in English classes.
Her daughters are improving in school and receiving tutoring at the shelter. “They’re very smart,” she said in Spanish. “Right now their limitation is language, but once they overcome that, I think they’ll go far.
” Martínez and her husband were granted work permits in February, and he has since gotten a job with a plumbing company. Now that they are both working, they hope to find a new place to live, but they want somewhere close so that their daughters can continue with their new friends and teachers at Perkins. “It’s a blessing from God,” Martínez said.
“I learned a while ago that we should not complain but be grateful for the things that happen to us, good or bad, because from the bad we learn and from the good we enjoy.”.
