The Necessity of Accelerated Programs for Overage and Undercredited Students

• In Event: Delayed, Deferred, Denied: Ensuring Immigrants’ Access to the Dreams and Possibilities of a Public Education

Abstract

For the past decade or more, the district has been the focus of considerable Latino student immigration, predominantly from Central American countries. Many of these Latino immigrants have entered the U.S. and the district at high school age, and a good number of them are in the SIFE category, as students with limited formal education. Many of these new immigrant students have come with their families or have arranged to live with relatives already in the district, but some are unaccompanied minors.

This stream of new young immigrants has resulted in an over-concentration of predominantly Spanish-speaking Latino students assigned to the district’s 9th grade, because district policy has traditionally placed over-age and under-credited students in that grade. These under-prepared high school 9th graders are expected to acquire the English Language skills they need, as well as take and pass the required content courses they need, to graduate high school. But the district high school, severely over-crowded and fiscally constrained, has very limited capacity to develop the instructional language resources and supports, as well as the accelerated curriculum alternatives that would help these students meet the requirements necessary for graduation before they age out at 21.

Moreover, many of these older students work during afternoon and evening hours, and often even during traditional schooling hours, to support their families or, if they are unaccompanied minors, to support themselves. Therefore they cannot easily take advantage of the district’s quite limited Evening School offerings. These Spanish-speaking 9th graders as a group have both the highest percentage of overall absence rates, and the highest percentage of chronically absent students – those students who miss more than 10% of their total annual school days – in the district. Our fear is that many of these over-age and under-credited Spanish-speaking immigrant students, who enter the district’s high school as part of the 9th grade “bulge”, will eventually drop out or age out at 21 before they manage to fulfill their graduation requirements.

Responses to this thorny problem involved a past effort, by the district, to deny, defer or delay enrollment to such over-age and under-credited Latino students, which is why the district has signed an agreement to discontinue those discriminatory practices with the state’s Attorney General’s Office. It is also why the district is currently being monitored to insure that the agreement’s requirements are being fulfilled. But although the district can no longer attempt to exclude these students, the district’s fiscal and recuperative resources are so constrained that very limited ameliorative efforts have thus far been launched. This presentation will conclude with a discussion about what the district might initiate to resolve the dilemmas faced by its over-age and under-credited population of Spanish-speaking high school age students.

Author

• Joy Sanzone, New York University