A Changing Portland, A Changing District: Language Diversity in the Centennial School District (Part One)

Pam Bejerano is the federal programs supervisor of a small school district on the east side of  Portland, Oregon. ((Ms. Bejerano has since left the Centennial School District)) And her experience with language diversity is expansive — Centennial’s 6,300 students speak 52 different languages! The language diversity in Centennial School District is a testament to the demographic changes the city has undergone as a result of its rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods and re-emergence as an immigrant gateway. Bejerano has witnessed those changes firsthand: “It’s not uncommon for a teacher to have 10 languages in [their] classroom...but even just 10 years ago that was significantly different. We were predominantly white and Hispanic and now we’re white minority with 52 languages and within our ELL population we’re seeing a lot more students come from refugee situations.”

The city of Portland is divided in two by the Willamette River. Historically, the river fractured Portland into its affluent west side and poorer east side. West of the river you’ll find the Portland you’ve likely read about — the Japanese Garden, Powell’s Books and the gleaming Air Tram. And east of the river, things are changing. There, you’ll find new developments sprouting up in neighborhoods that have traditionally been home to the city’s African-American, immigrant and low-income residents. Centennial bridges between Portland and the city of Gresham — an area that has become a “landing zone” for ethnic minorities and the city’s poorest residents.

Centennial school district has sometimes struggled to keep pace with the influx of refugee and newcomer students who often arrive with limited schooling and traumatic backgrounds. Bejerano explained, “We had suddenly 30 new Somali students...from a refugee camp in Kenya and so hadn’t had formal schooling. We’re...getting kids from the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq...these are all places where we’ve not previously had kids [from] and they’ve been living in some pretty horrific situations.” Clearly, all schools should be adaptive in their approaches to serving students, but Centennial’s unique demographics convert flexibility from a good practice to an absolute necessity.

Devising systematic and consistent programming for refugee students has proved challenging because their enrollment numbers fluctuate year-to-year. Bejerano commented on the difficulty of creating a stable program for newcomers, “We created a class one year because we had …four kids at the high school who were reading first grade level or below so suddenly we’re asking their ELL teachers...to teach kids also how to read... but then the next year we didn’t really have anybody so we got rid of that period.” From her perspective, the district still has a long way to go, “To be honest we’re still not doing a great job serving those kids.”

Many Centennial schools work closely with Portland’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO) language bank to ensure families have access to interpreters. IRCO also has a case manager who works in two schools to provide direct support to immigrant and refugee students and families. Several schools have Spanish and Russian bilingual liaisons (employed by the district) who provide families with support — for example, explaining special education services — and develop trusting relationships with them.

Some Centennial schools, such as Lynch Wood Elementary, are slowly transitioning towards a community school model that provides students and their families with wraparound services. Over 80 percent of students at Lynch Wood qualify for Free and Reduced Meals (FARMs), 25 percent are ELLs, 11 percent are homeless, and a growing number are refugees. The student population is also highly transient because the school has several apartment complexes within its catchment area. As principal Andrea Sande explained, “We know that those families that have kind of all of the things that make life difficult...I don’t have a car. I don’t have a job. I can’t find work. My kids have special needs…Or I don’t speak English...[they] need more of our kind of wraparound support.”

Lynch Wood is a site for Multnomah County’s Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN) program. Amber Moore, the school’s SUN coordinator, described the program as a community center within a school, “We do everything...from summer feeding to kindergarten transition to afterschool programs [and] resource referral...It’s really a broad range of services that are designed to support the community and really turn the school into a hub of services.” Moreover, each SUN site looks a little different because the program aims to align services with each community’s specific needs.

The school has adopted multiple initiatives and taken on several pilot programs to maximize the number of services they can provide for students and families. First, Lynch Wood has a caseworker from Oregon’s Department of Human Services on site who assists families on public assistance and receiving TANF. “It just makes sense where families are more likely to feel welcomed and accepted to come here instead of having to go down to DHS where they have to pull a number and wait,” says Sande. “It’s a different level of service they can get here by contacting a case worker here.”

Additionally, Lynch Wood offers the Ready, Set, Go kindergarten readiness program targeted at three-and-four-year-old children and their parents. The program places emphasis on helping parents learn about early childhood development and strategies for preparing their child for kindergarten. It’s offered in English and Spanish and many of the school’s Burmese families are enrolled as well. Efforts are also underway to address chronic absenteeism through a pilot demonstration project that seeks to identify barriers to regular student attendance and develop strategies and incentives to address them. Finally, last year, the kindergarten teachers engaged in a pilot home visiting program — they did meet and greets at student’s homes and dropped off welcome kits — and the school hopes to get funding to continue these efforts.

But even with these initiatives, the demands of meeting the needs of such a diverse community of learners often leaves school and district staff feeling as if they’re always coming up short, “In schools like ours where you have a dozen or more languages and people from different parts of the world with different experiences to feel like you’re doing an adequate job is just not our reality,” shared Principal Sande. “We often feel stretched beyond our abilities.”

And that’s where better policies come in. Everyone in Centennial School District bemoaned the current policy which mandates that refugees can only receive federal assistance (Food Stamps, Medicare, money for housing) support during their first eight months in the U.S. “I think that for our refugee families we do not provide them enough infrastructure support,” said Sande, “They get such basic, basic transition support and then they’re kinda just left on their own.” A point to which Bejerano added, “[T]hey don’t even have enough support to get them through a school year. An agency that sponsors them can support them for 8–9 months and then that support runs out and sometimes families that have to move because the housing that they’re in they can no longer afford.”

What can be done? It’s a truly complicated problem. State and federal support could be increased to match the length of the school year, but that’s tricky because refugees arrive at different times.  Coordination between sponsoring agencies and the local government (including schools) could be improved, but money is tight and capacity is constrained, which makes cross-sector collaboration difficult. The county (and state) could increase funding for wraparound services or the development of community schools, but funding streams often lag behind the quickly changing needs of communities.  Which is to say that crafting responsive and timely policies is a heavy lift in our current (and fractured) political landscape.

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This post is part of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Click here for more information on this team's work. To subscribe to the biweekly newsletter, click here, enter your contact information, and select "Education Policy.""