By Steve Brawner
SPRINGDALE — The immigration debate has a human face at Robert E. Lee Elementary — hundreds of faces, actually.
There, teachers are faced with the daily challenge of reaching a student body of which 65 percent speak English as their second language and 90 percent are on free or reduced price lunch plans.
For these students — from south of the border and from the Marshall Islands — parental involvement is just as important as for those whose families have been in America for generations. But involving parents who speak little English has been a challenge.
Two years ago, the district was one of five in the country to receive a Toyota grant enabling it to take part in a national program created by the National Center for Family Literacy. Four mornings a week, parents at Lee Elementary and seven other Springdale campuses attend English classes at their children’s schools that include 30 minutes of side-by-side participation with their children in their classrooms.
The program helps parents learn the language and teaches them what their children are learning, and how they are learning, in school. It also helps them feel more a part of the school community.
Lee’s principal, Regina Stewman, and adult English teacher Jennifer Met say the shy parents who enter the program with their eyes glued to the table in front of them gain a new sense of confidence and belonging, and their children’s academic performance improves. One kindergarten student had so many behavioral issues that staff members thought he might should be held back. He immediately improved when his mother enrolled in the program two years ago, and this year he is a model student.
Reina Herrera — an American citizen from El Salvador — beams as she describes in accented but grammatically correct English the progress she has made in one year after learning relatively little English her first 14 years in America. She and her husband, Humberto, recently considered returning to El Salvador but decided to stay for their children’s sake. But, thanks in large part to their improving English skills, they’re not just building better lives for their children. Both hope someday to go to college — she to become a nurse, he to become a statistician.
While the Herreras are American citizens, there is no doubt that some of the families at Lee Elementary are here illegally. Outside the district, their status is a hot political topic, and for good reason. While America is a land of immigrants, it’s also a nation of laws. Emma Lazarus’ famous poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty — the one that extends an invitation to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — also ends with the words, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Doors are places of controlled entry, not open thresholds. If the government is supposed to do anything, it’s supposed to police its borders.
But that’s the federal government’s responsibility — not Regina Stewman’s and Jennifer Met’s. They are prohibited by law from asking families for their immigration papers, which is a good thing because goodness knows schools have enough to worry about these days without having to do the Border Patrol’s job for it.
Instead, they are faced with the practical reality of what to do with a school full of students whose English may not be so great and whose parents may not speak English at all. For them, immigration isn’t about debating whether or not the United States should build a wall on its southern border or whether or not Arizona’s new immigration law is constitutional. It’s about the children who are their responsibility, every day, once they walk through the schoolhouse doors.
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Steve Brawner is a freelance journalist, a former newspaper editor, and a former aide to former Gov. Mike Huckabee and Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller. His e-mail address is brawnersteve@mac.com
