Newcomer students boost enrollment, but bring new challenges to schools 

The fifth and sixth graders watched intently as Principal Fernando Hernandez flipped through the pages of the picture book. The five students, hailing from Venezuela, Mexico and Peru, read each word aloud with him, swinging their feet under the table and giggling as the pages revealed cartoonish scenes of a dog.

Before Hernandez’s students started attending Perkins Elementary in San Diego, some of them spent months traversing South and Central America to get here.

“We went around the world,” one student said. They have the stories to prove it: They saw iguanas and monkeys in the infamous Darien Gap, rode the freight train “La Bestia” through Mexico to the border and waited months for an appointment to enter the U.S. legally. 

Now, they’re among thousands of migrant students that recently have enrolled in San Diego County schools in the past few years. 

The term “newcomer” is defined in a new state law as a student between the ages of 3 and 21 who has been enrolled in a U.S. school for less than three years. 

According to an inewsource analysis of district and state data, four of the county’s top 10 districts saw overall enrollment increase slightly between the 2022-23 to 2023-24 school years, in part because of newcomers. In others, the increases in newcomer students lessened the overall decline of enrollment in districts, but did not necessarily lead to overall increases in enrollment. 

But while newcomers have boosted enrollment in some districts, potentially helping schools to stave off difficult decisions that come with downsizing, their unique needs can present challenges, too. 

Newcomer students are increasingly diverse, speaking many languages and hailing from many countries, including Ukraine, China, and Afghanistan as well as Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba and Haiti. 

Many are asylum-seekers or refugees and carry traumatic stories from their childhoods and journeys to the U.S. Some have interrupted formal education backgrounds and do not speak English. Newcomer families often struggle with housing and food insecurity, medical care and other basic needs, challenges that also mean they are more likely to drop out of school than other students.

“They do have a lot of educational needs that school districts and school systems should really be spending extra attention on these students,” said Xilonin Cruz-Gonzalez, deputy director of Californians Together, a research and advocacy group focused on supporting English language learners across the state.

That’s part of why Californians Together supported AB 714, the state bill authored by Assemblymember Kevin McCarty and signed into law a year ago. The law directs the state Department of Education to track newcomer student data and release guidance on how schools can best serve them. 

One difference between today’s newcomers and those of years prior, Cruz-Gonzalez said, is that they’re not just clustering in the same districts, but spread out in schools that may have just a handful of them. The result is a varied level of preparedness among school districts to receive newcomer students, she said. 

“We see really great things happening across the state, but it’s very uneven and it’s definitely not systemic,” Cruz Gonzalez said. 

Increased enrollment in San Diego County

While overall enrollment in San Diego County schools has declined over the past five years, at least four San Diego County school districts saw overall enrollment increase slightly from the 2022-23 to 2023-24 school year – in part due to newcomer students. 

Roughly 6% of students – or 5,700 – at San Diego Unified, California’s second largest school district which includes Perkins Elementary, were newcomers in this school year. About half of those students enrolled in the past year. 

Officials with Cajon Valley Unified School District, which has 27 schools across 60 miles of San Diego’s East County, said more than half of new students in the 2023-24 school year were newcomers. 

Last year, Poway Unified and Chula Vista Elementary school districts also saw slight increases in their newcomer enrollment and general enrollment compared to the previous year – about 10% and 5% increases for newcomers, respectively. 

Immigration has long been a driver of public school enrollment and California’s population more generally, and recent waves of newcomer students may have helped some schools stave off downsizing and closures, according to Julien Lafortune, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. 

“At the same time, a lot of newcomer students also face additional needs and challenges, and so the school will have to provide for those,” Lafortune said.

California public schools receive government funding based on average daily attendance, so more students coming to school means more funding. Schools also receive additional funding for “high-need” students including foster youth, low-income and English learners. 

Three local districts – San Diego Unified, Cajon Valley and Grossmont Union High – have used grant funding through CalNEW, a state program focused on enrolling newcomers and supporting their families. San Diego Unified received $1.2 million, Cajon Valley received $1.8 million and Grossmont Union High received about $711,000 between 2021 and 2024 through the grant. 

Cajon Valley first created its newcomer program, the Family and Community Engagement Office, eight years ago. El Cajon, where Cajon Valley schools are located, has long been an enclave for immigrant and refugee communities from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. 

That district’s offerings include a program to teach parents how to help their kids with school, a “poverty simulation” for school staff to understand challenges like loss of income, housing insecurity and childcare, home visits, welcome meetings for newcomers and a sports and stem education program and counseling for refugee students. 

Cajon Valley also helps train and advise around 100 school districts, too. 

“We’ve gotten phone calls from districts saying we got a (newcomer) family,” said Janice Raymond, who helps train and support teachers in Cajon Valley district’s newcomer office. Schools are asking them, “What do we do?” Raymond said. 

But even teachers and schools which have worked with newcomers for years are dealing with new challenges. 

Norma Reyes, a teacher at Lincoln High School in San Diego Unified, has worked with newcomers for nearly two decades. She said by the fifth week of this school year, her class size was already up to 30 students, about six times larger than what she has in a typical year. 

“There was just such a huge influx all at the same time,” Reyes said. 

The students have a range of needs: Students in her class speak six different languages and some have gaps in their education while others are performing at grade level but don’t speak English. The larger-than-usual class size makes it challenging to get up to speed on the needs of each of her students. 

While California law requires every teacher with English learners in their classroom to have English Language Development training, there is no special certification or education track that focuses on how to teach newcomers, who enter the classroom with a range of education levels and language skills.

So she and other teachers like her have learned on the job how to educate newcomers, Reyes added.

Reyes said she relies on another teacher and literacy coach to help teach her students fundamental literacy skills. She may soon get help from a math teacher as well, she said.

At her school, Reyes said resources to help newcomers are adequate but the district needs to establish a set program for these types of students who have gaps in their education, particularly at the secondary level. 

“There’s a world of difference between a 16-year-old who comes in and a six-year-old. A six-year-old has time. At 16, you don’t have time. You don’t have time to learn the language and to gather the content that you need to be able to graduate, especially if you’ve gone from one country to another,” she said. 

San Diego Unified’s newcomer centers could help. Funded by a $1.7 million grant from the City of San Diego, the centers are open at five of the district’s schools with the highest newcomer populations and conducting intake assessments of students and their families, said Marissa Allan, senior director of the multilingual education department at San Diego Unified. 

This will help the district to identify their unique needs and connect them with relevant services, such as helping students who need additional language support and counseling services, she said. 

San Diego Unified is trying to build the support that newcomers need, but additional resources are needed, Allan added. 

“The schools are and the district is definitely feeling the changes and the needs for instruction and just the needs for the family,” she said. 

Specifically, the district needs more resource teachers to help newcomer students with basic literacy skills but hasn’t hired them, facing staffing challenges like many districts, Allan said. Because of this, the district is focusing on strengthening training for teachers on how to improve language acquisition for students as they learn various subjects.

“The new teachers coming out of credential programs have a very basic understanding and do not have the skills,” needed to teach newcomers, she said. “We districts are having to provide additional training for that.”

National School District Superintendent Leighangela Brady said the new languages of newcomer students have impacted the district more than the number of students. 

Historically, the district’s students have mainly spoken English, Spanish and Tagalog. But in recent years they’re seeing students who speak Creole, Farsi, Pashto, among others. 

From 2021-22 to 2023-24 the district’s traditional schools lost about 5% of their total student population – or 236 students. In that same time frame, newcomer students increased by 31 students. Officials with the district said that amounts to a handful of newcomer students in each school.

Still, supporting them can be a challenge, Brady said. 

One newcomer student may need counseling, a specialized computer program, translators for parents, intervention teachers to reinforce language lessons and additional programming. 

“There’s a lot of costs, and the money that we’re getting doesn’t cover the full cost,” Brady said.

But Sam Finn, director of newcomer policy and practice at Californians Together, said more funding isn’t necessarily the answer. The solution should focus on “redesigning and improving systems that were not designed to incorporate newcomer students.” Schools have done this before for students with disabilities or English learners, Finn said. 

The support newcomer students need – many of them having experienced trauma – are similar to what other students need, especially coming out of the pandemic, said Kimberly White-Smith, dean of University of San Diego’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences. 

“This is an opportunity for us to really think more critically and deeply about the socio-emotional support that we build into our schools,” White-Smith said. “All of our students need it now.”

Outside the classroom, community cultural groups have helped bridge the gap between what schools can provide and what new immigrant families need. 

Somali Family Service of San Diego has been serving East African migrants for more than two decades. With the changing profile of immigrants entering the U.S. and San Diego in the last few years, the organization has expanded its services to other groups, said Mustafa Sahid, director of operation with the organization.

Challenges for families include language barriers, a lack of access to additional educational resources like tutoring and exposure to bullying at school driven mostly by cultural differences, such as dress, prayer and accents, Sahid said. 

“So some of the similar challenges that we’re used to hearing about and used to the families experiencing, but just new populations that are dealing with it now,” Sahid said. 

At Perkins Elementary, Principal Hernandez says he first focuses on creating a welcoming environment. He’s tried to learn words in languages that parents speak and created a buddy system so that new students are never alone on the playground. 

For years, Perkins has enrolled newcomer students, but the more recent enrollments represent “a completely different dynamic,” Hernandez said. 

Some students in his class had traumatic journeys to the U.S. Hernandez has families who have been kidnapped or exposed to other violence, or have seen human corpses. Some are living in local homeless shelters.

But here in the classroom, Hernandez said it’s important for kids to be able to just be kids. 

“See how they’re smiling right now, they’re laughing? This is awesome. This is how it’s supposed to be,” Hernandez said. 

Correction: Oct. 25, 2024

A previous version of this story listed an incorrect name for USD’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences.