One afternoon a few months ago, a young man speaking the merest scraps of English unexpectedly appeared at the offices of the Center for New York City Affairs (CNYCA). He’d arrived in New York City early this year from the West African nation of Senegal – one of the more than 200,000 migrants seeking U.S. asylum who’ve come here from a panoply of nations since the spring of 2022, usually fleeing economic hardship, armed conflict, or other terrors. 

Like most of his fellow migrants, he’d been living in a temporary City shelter where he’d let others there know in his first language – Pulaar – that he wanted to enroll in school. He was forwarded an email sent to another shelter resident from the CNYCA InsideSchools project that one of us (Natasha) heads. For the past 15 months, it has been helping newly arrived migrants navigate the complexities of the nation’s largest school system. 

While unable to grasp the email’s instructions (written in English and French) to meet at a school location, he did notice that it included CNYCA’s office location. Showing no small degree of resourcefulness, he found us – and taking him under our wing, we immediately began the ultimately successful process of placing him in a school.

Unfortunately, however, many similarly situated young migrants – while typically displaying the same high levels of ingenuity and determination – haven’t been able to achieve comparably happy results. A growing subset of the more than 42,000 newcomer students who’ve entered New York City schools since 2022, they are aged 18 to 21, and have often – like the young man I just described – come to the U.S. unaccompanied by other family members.  Eager to resume their sometimes seriously disrupted educations, they all too regularly instead run into dispiriting bureaucratic brick walls.

Many struggle to enroll at the Department of Education Family Welcome Centers where assistance is supposed to happen. Those who speak languages such as Pulaar, Wolof, or Arabic struggle to communicate with staff there. They are often told that there is no space in schools tailored to meet their needs, such as transfer schools (offering classes for overage students) or the city’s network of international schools. 

Instead, they are deemed too old, or lacking academic credits (how many are able to bring transcripts with them on their long journey to New York?), or insufficiently English-proficient. So, they are referred to adult education programs, an option that doesn’t align with their academic aspirations. “I am very discouraged,” one such young man rather plaintively told an InsideSchools staffer. “I want to learn, but the schools don’t want me.”

To overcome these barriers, InsideSchools staff have accompanied more than 65 young people to Family Welcome Centers, transfer schools, and adult education centers to help place them in settings that suit them. We’ve also developed partnerships with the Internationals Network for Public Schools (headed by one of us, Lara), transfer schools, and community-based organizations like Afrikana. 

Since 2023, Internationals Network’s 15 New York City high schools have enrolled over 1,000 older newcomer students. It has also created free resources as well as Project SOARING, a professional development program for school leaders that draws on what decades of experience have taught us.

The reality is that schools need to adapt their structures and processes in ways that meet the needs and build on the assets of older newcomer youth from the outset. Everything needs to shift – from registration and intake to classroom practices and how teachers collaborate. A successful school for newcomers also provides a holistic approach that includes expanded wraparound services and broader advocacy for these young people. The good news is that these critical shifts and supports actually benefit all students, so serving older newcomers well helps the whole community.  

Unfortunately complicating such efforts is an accountability system embedded in the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA), the primary source of federal aid for local schools. In its current form, ESSA penalizes schools that serve students who may enter at age 20 and be unable to graduate before “aging out” at 21, or who may take more than four years to graduate because of limited and/or disrupted education in their homelands. Schools should be incentivized to educate these eager young learners, and the Congressional reauthorization of ESSA expected next year must create these incentives.

Tomorrow, October 17th, we’re co-hosting an online policy forum where a panel of experts will discuss the challenges and solutions to ensuring the doors to our schools remain open for older newcomer youth. Because instead of viewing these students as a challenge, we must recognize them as an essential part of our city’s educational fabric, deserving of more robust support and understanding. Their motivation is undeniable, and ought to be rewarded, not thwarted.

Natasha Quiroga is director of education policy and InsideSchools at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. Lara Evangelista is executive director of the Internationals Network for Public Schools.

Photo by: Internationals Network