Southern Delaware has long been a popular destination for Guatemalan immigrants seeking a better life, often in the chicken industry. But last year, officials at Indian River School District saw the number of recently arrived immigrant teenagers enrolled in school swell because of the wave of unaccompanied kids who crossed the U.S. border in 2014. They soon discovered traditional ESL programs were not effectively serving that group of kids, most of whom had little to no schooling back in Central America. So they decided to create a new curriculum that meets these approximately 60 immigrant kids where they are academically. It’s called the APELL program, which stands for Accelerating Preliterate English Language Learners.. Delaware Public Media's Anne Hoffman recently paid the program a visit.
Lori Ott’s classroom at the G.W. Career Educational Center in Frankford is full of smiling teenagers. That may seem somewhat unusual, but for these students, most of whom hail from poor communities in rural Guatemala, school is a privilege, an honor and a way forward.
"Crisanta is sitting nice and waiting quietly," says Ott.
Right now the kids are naming examples of solids that they see around the room. It’s a way of teaching them English while sneaking in high school science concepts.
"Look at all these words that you know in English now! Do you remember the beginning of the year? You could not name one word," she says, while writing the students' words on a big sheet of paper.
[caption id="attachment_73332" align="alignright" width="265"]https://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ESL-picture.jpg Lori Ott makes a word map for her students at the APELL program in Frankford, DE.[/caption]
Ott, an English as a Second Language specialist, helped design the APELL program. It’s a school day centered around an intensive ESL class, math and physical education. The APELL program targets kids who have low levels of education even in their first language, which for most of the teens here is Spanish, or a Mayan language called Mam.
Yolanda Cortez is one student here, a teenager who arrived six months ago. Her first language is Mam, and she's from Quetzaltenango, a mountainous city in Guatemala.
Yolanda and I spoke in Spanish, a language she says she now thinks in, but when I ask her what some of her biggest challenges, or desafios, have been here, she doesn’t recognize the word.
"Excuse me," she says, "what does ‘challenge’ mean?" After she understands the word, Yolanda explains that at first she was afraid of school. She thought it would be too hard, that she would never get used to it. But quickly that fear left and she began to trust Laurie Ott, her teacher.
"She's a good teacher," says Yolanda.
Ott is a seasoned teacher who loves working with this population of kids, many of whom came here as unaccompanied minors. But the lack of education they received at home can be challenging.
"I notice when they’re writing, it’s one big piece with no punctuation, no capital letters, no way to indicate sentences," Ott says. "No way to indicate paragraphs. Just one big piece of writing that does not flow well, ideas are not connected."
Since many kids didn’t even get a good grounding in Spanish at home, it’s harder for them to learn English than it would be for most teenagers.
LouAnn Hudson, the Director of Curriculum and Instruction, says that was the motivation for creating the new APELL program, which is an alternative to attending a big, American high school with one hour a day of ESL class.
"We felt it was our duty to really provide something different for these students," says Hudson.
There have been Guatemalan students in Sussex County’s public schools since the 1990s. But typically many of those kids came over at a very early age. Last year, beginning in January, teachers and staff noticed that the numbers of new immigrant teens were much higher.
"Of course at that time we did not know why they were coming," says Hudson. "We knew that we were getting this influx of students. From a district standpoint we knew that we were not meeting their needs."
When Central American teenagers struggle with their American coursework, it’s easy for the school district to lose them. There are so many factors that compete for their time in school -- jobs they could be working, family members they could be helping. The APELL program is supposed to meet them where they are to ensure they don’t get discouraged and give up.
"We really, desperately want to keep them in school and I think we’re all getting, we’re a little beyond half way through the year, we know the summer break is coming, we’re nervous that they won’t return to school," Hudson says.
For students like Alexander Ortiz, not returning to school would be unthinkable. He’s only been at the program for one month, but Ott says he concentrates hard in class. In fact he came here not to get a job but to pursue a career that he could never aspire to in Guatemala because his family’s poverty made it impossible.
"I wanted to study to be a doctor," he says, "but I didn’t have the money to pay school fees."
The APELL program is one step on the long path to med school, but it’s a start.