By Veronica Estefania Velazquez

        Among the many students that enroll in high school every year,  a portion of  them are English Language Learner students, students who are still developing English proficiency, and are in the Newcomer Program.  ELL students are classified in three different categories. “Newcomer students,” those who have been residents of the U.S. for three years or less. “Developing students,” those who have been in the country for three to five years. And finally, “Long term students,” those who have been living in the U.S. for five or more years. Once a student meets English proficiency benchmarks, they are reclassified and moved out of the program. 

Although a student might meet the requirements to be part of this community, no student with these characteristics is obligated to receive ELL support and can opt to instead go into general education (GE) classes. 

In an effort to support those students that need to develop English proficiency, the state of California has created special programs and curriculums. Not every school provides these resources, but Lincoln is one of the schools in the San Francisco Unified District that has a Newcomer Pathway through the Multilingual Pathway Department. 

The Newcomer Pathway requires a team effort to support and oversee the program, with different departments involved. When getting to know the Newcomer Pathway, Marlena Doyle is  one of the people who students interact with the most, as she is the only Academic Counselor for Newcomers. Doyle has occupied this role for 15 years.  

Just last year Doyle also became an Academic Counselor for General Education Students with last names that start with X, Y, and Z. The counselor’s caseload changed due to the district-level Multilingual Pathway Department deciding last year to phase  out the Newcomer Pathway. This plan changed however. “Due to high Newcomer enrollment, they have actually expanded [the Newcomer Pathway]. We will have even more seats for newcomers next school year,” Doyle expresses excitedly. 

The program has grown over the years. When Doyle started working at our school, there were only ELA and ELD sheltered classes. There was not enough management of the pathway, meaning no ELL Coordinator or Parent Liaisons. There was no training or special type of focus on this population of students.

Because the district has decided to continue the pathway, the school will continue to offer all core content classes in a sheltered environment including the ELD (English Language Development) classes and ELA (English Language Arts). 

A common goal among ELL students is to be reclassified from the Newcomer Pathway to the general education  program, and many students obsess over it, but Doyle suggests looking at the bigger picture. 

“High School is the time to build your English language foundation for college and the work world. Once you leave the Newcomer Pathway you will never have this level of support around learning English. We want students to be prepared and not just able to get into college but also finish college with a degree!” says the counselor. 

This does not mean that reclassification is not important. It is personally valuable for some students and families. Learning English is hard, and families endure a lot to come to the US. The school district perspective is that reclassification is important because it proves that students are prepared because of the teachers and their own personal efforts. There is not a specific time in which students are expected to be reclassified, as it is not a race but rather a process in which students will meet certain benchmarks. The English Language Proficiency Assessments for California (ELPAC) is administered during the spring and is the most comprehensive measure there is of English skills. It determines what courses students should take the next academic year, but other factors such as ‘Reading Inventory’ or the ‘Smarter Balanced ELA’ assessment also determine whether a student is subject to reclassification. 

A lot of work goes into students achieving significant progress in English proficiency,  which is unfortunately not easy to achieve. This proficiency has  a significant effect on student’s academic life, as they are not able to properly learn all of the content from the different subjects, which can result in low grades, demotivation, mental health issues, and a low enrollment to college.

One of the obstacles that most affects  how efficiently ELL students develop their English skills is lack of resources. 

Evelyn Sulem, the English Language Coordinator at  Lincoln believes that the most important problem to solve right now in order to better support ELL classes is the shortage of teachers in both the GE program and the ELL program. If there aren’t enough teachers for the GE program, the ELL program doesn’t have any better luck. 

 There are currently 16 teachers for the different sheltered sections: Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, World History, U.S. History, Economics and American Democracy, Ethnic Studies, Physics, Biology, ELD, American Literature, English and European Literature, CSU Expository Writing, English 1, English 2, and the Long Term support class. 

Regardless of the number of teachers, Sulem recognizes that there is a problem with both the number of teachers and their preparation. 

“Almost nobody wants to become an ELL teacher; it is very hard to teach a subject at different levels of English proficiency. Many ELL teachers are new to the profession, and as soon as they can, they move to teach regular education. In other words, there is a high turnover rate. I also don’t think we get enough training. As I mentioned before, it is very difficult to teach immigrants at different English levels.” 

She also added that teachers of the Newcomer Pathway do not get paid more than GE education teachers, which demotivates teachers even more from taking on the responsibility of teaching ELL courses. 

Newcomers continue to arrive after the start of school throughout the entire school year, which makes it difficult for all newcomers in one class to be synchronized, and teachers have to start all over with the just-arrived students, which can be exhausting.  

Doyle says that along with the lack of classroom resources comes  the lack of resources outside the classroom. ELL students have dense stories related to their immigration experiences, many of them which are traumatizing. On top of that, they are forced to adapt to a new lifestyle, sometimes without family support and with the need of finding a job that interferes with their school schedules to pay for basic necessities that in an ideal situation they would not have to worry about. 

From a student’s perspective, the Newcomer Pathway has a lot of improvement to make. “I think there should be more resources towards the ELL program because a good learning environment is extremely important when learning a new language. Students should be more informed about what the program is and how to be reclassified. Students who just came have to deal with lots of immigration stuff. I think it’s also important that ELL students be encouraged to become involved because they have little knowledge of the educational system, the clubs and the resources,” expresses 12th grader and former ELL student Yiran Wang.  

To solve these issues, it’s important to work on both the lack of outside and school resources. “To target the problem, mental health, family engagement and support for the family is necessary,” proposes Doyle. 

This she hopes would also target student expectations. Many Newcomers do not know how to function as a high school student; they do not attend classes regularly, and some end up dropping out. 

Sulem proposes that classes for ELL students have teachers’ aides, specifically at least one that speaks Chinese and another one that speaks Spanish. Finally, she says that everyone can help even a little bit. ELL students are often targets to pick on by non ELL students. 

“We need to make sure that we act in such a way that doesn't make ELL students feel like second class students in the school,” says Sulem.

Published 5/23/23

By  Ivy Thai

A language barrier is often one of the main factors that demotivates immigrant students from taking advantage of available opportunities around them as well as the necessary steps to prepare for the next chapter of their life. With the idea of supporting the newcomer community in mind, two years ago, Kevin Cauich, a college ambassador who helps seniors with college applications at Lincoln, worked towards planning and recruiting officers to put this idea into practice. 

The funds for the English Language Development (ELD) project come directly through the district’s college ambassador program that Cauich is a part of. Officers, which are students who worked on the project, would receive a stipend every semester. He reached out to teachers and counselors to get in touch with newcomer students who are involved in leadership positions at school, such as being a part of the Associated Student Body, a club, or in Peer Resources. 

Believing that former and current ELD students understand the circumstance of an immigrant student more than anyone else, he limited the outreach to this group of students. 

“For whatever community you are helping, you have to include members of that community. If I have a non-ELD student helping an ELD student, even though I believe that they’ll do an amazing job, they won't have that perspective of being an ELD [student],” says Cauich. 

A personal connection led to Veronica Estefania Velazquez Macias’s decision to join the team.

Macias shares, “I’ve always wanted to help the English Learner (EL) community at our school because when I got here freshman year, I didn’t know how to choose classes, what I’d need to graduate, or where I want to go for college. I remember asking a lot of questions to my counselor. [Although] she was helpful in many ways, I know she’s always busy with other stuff.” 

The ELD project’s primary goal is to expose newcomer sophomores to college-related information at an early stage. The team focuses on sophomores because they believe the sophomore year is the right time to build up their extracurricular activities list and maintain good grades. 

Under the shadow of Cauich, seniors Veronica Estefania Velazquez Macias, Yiran Wang, Aizhan Turgunbekova, and TanIeng Huang meet up at lunch every Friday to reflect on their week as well as dividing the tasks of researching and preparing slides for upcoming presentations.

Once a month, the four officers would stop by rooms 141 and 212 to host a multilingual workshop in Chinese, English, Russian, and Spanish for a large population of EL sophomores during the advisory period. 

Lisset Madrigal, a Lincoln history and one of the 10th-grade EL advisory teachers, expresses, “It’s a plus that we have students coming in and translating the main languages that I have in my class.”  

Past topics covered include, but are not limited to “Why it’s important to get out of the ELD program?”, “Why are extracurricular activities important?” “Different types of colleges,” and “The A-G graduation requirements.”

Zhixuan Cai, a sophomore who settled in the U.S. around four years ago, reflects, “I got to learn how to plan my high school life, about clubs, and classes to take next year. The EL students don’t know a lot of English. We can’t search by ourselves in English. They [the seniors] find the information and also translate it into Chinese, my native language, to help us. [The given information] was just right.”

Wang's favorite part of the project is when students ask her questions during the presentation. 

“It made me feel as if I was using my own experience and knowledge to assist those who may be struggling to understand how things work in the U.S., particularly the educational system and the ELD program in which students are enrolled because they often had no idea how it works,” recalls Wang.

As the summer quickly approaches, the team invited Carlo Solis, Chief Executive Officer of Enterprise for Youth, a nonprofit organization with a mission to prepare high school students for future careers and college by providing them with available jobs and internships, to share some available opportunities they could sign up for. 

“We make sure to have materials in their home languages, staff that can help them with their unique needs, and they get paid because a lot of time, internships are unpaid, and it can be a big thing with low-income students, says Solis. 

Madrigal observes, “Today, there are a lot of questions from students, a lot of interest, and just general questions about the internship. It’s the first time that they’ve been told that [they] can earn a bit during the summer, and it starts fueling the fire [inside them].”

Taking teachers’ feedback as an opportunity to improve their operation, the team has started to pass out flyers during presentations so students can follow along. They also provided a Google Form in different language versions for the students to fill out when they have additional questions.

“This is our first year, so there’ll be some flaws,” says Cauich. 

The small capacity of the core group is one of the many obstacles to expanding the project to help immigrant students from other grade levels. 

Macias voices, “We need more staff because when we do presentations, we want to make everyone feel included and understand the information that we are trying to bring to them. There are other languages like French and Tagalog, and we don’t have anyone who speaks these languages. If we have more people, we’d also be able to do two presentations a month.”

Counting down a few weeks till graduation, the mentor and four seniors are working on a booklet that includes all the covered topics in different languages to distribute during a final meeting with the sophomores near the end of May. 

They’ll also analyze how significant the students' understanding of colleges compares to the data they collected in the Fall through another round of surveys. 

“[I will] talk to my coordinator to see after seeing how much progress we made if she’s interested in [continuing funding] for the project, or if she wants anything different. If [everything’s good], I’ll continue to reach out to students [to recruit] the same way I did this year,” says Cauich.

Published 5/23/23

By  Sofia Kamikawa

 The word learning usually brings up the image of being enclosed in a classroom, with a textbook in hand, but language teachers at Abraham Lincoln High School (ALHS) are breaking the boundaries and taking their students abroad during the summer. Students are given the opportunity to travel abroad this summer to learn about the variety of cultures that our world has to offer. 

Before summer begins, there is a certain group of students who have been given a chance to study overseas. Language teachers Marco Mendoza, Arisa Hiroi, and Koichi Sano have opened up opportunities for students to keep learning over the summer through study abroad programs. These students will be able to connect with the language, culture, and history of the homelands that they will be visiting. 

At the beginning of the school year, Señor Mendoza's Spanish students were given a chance to sign up to study abroad for nine days in Spain. Students will have a chance to connect the language that they have been learning all year to the culture of Spain. Personal experiences in the homeland of a country are proven to create deeper connections than by learning a language through a textbook or in a classroom. In addition, it forces students to learn from native speakers, creating this gateway of possible experiences.

In the past, Señor Mendoza has used "Ultimate Break Tours'' where they connect students to international travels all around the world. This year, Mendoza hopes to embark on this journey with his students using "EF Educational Tours," which he has used in the past for his own personal study abroad experience. 

Señor Mendoza hopes to recreate those experiences for his students. He recollects the six months that he was fortunate enough to study in Spain, which opened his eyes to the possibility of becoming a Spanish teacher. "It opens up your bubble… and going internationally you learn so much about yourself and about the culture," he recalls. 

Hiroi and Sano, both Japanese language teachers at ALHS, hope to do the same for their students. They plan to visit various cities in Japan including Kyoto, Nara, Osaka and Tokyo together, and then they split into two groups to create a homestay experience for their students. Hiroi will take her students to Minamiboso, Japan where she used to work for an international exchange association, while Sano will take his students to Tsukuba, Japan near the Tsukuba international school. 

In 2012, Hiroi and Sano's students studied in Japan with the Japanese government funding the whole trip. The Japanese government took notice of the hard work ALHS students were making with hopes of fundraising money for Japanese homes in 2011, after the Great Sendai Earthquake, which killed 20,000 plus, in addition to displacing people from their homes and families.  

This year Hiroi and Sano are using Kintetsu Inc. to host students in Japan. They plan to house each student with host families in Japan. Hiroi hopes to show students the vast opportunities that can be created through studying a language and how "it's such a great skill to be able to take you places that you might not have been able to go before." Hiroi's students will be given the chance to learn the conversation patterns of elementary and middle school students. 

Sano, on the other hand, will be taking his students to Tsukuba, Japan which houses Tsukuba International School from K-12. He hopes to show students the possibilities of studying in Japan, while also revealing all that is often lost in a textbook. 

  Being able to travel abroad is a privilege that not many are able to afford. However, with the programs that Mendoza, Hiroi, and Sano have chosen it has made it easier for students to pay for their trips. Mendoza's students are able to create GoFundMe pages, through the EF education tours, and share them with their loved ones for help on their trip. 

Hiroi and Sano have worked with the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California in Japantown, where they hosted a nabe night to fundraise for the Japanese program at ALHS. Nabe is a traditional Japanese winter hot-pot dish that is commonly eaten to celebrate the harmony that you have with the people around you. Students helped clean up and set up the event by cutting up ingredients, cleaning dishes and more.

Sano realizes that studying can be expensive, but sees that even if it may not be abroad it could be "anything outside of your comfort zone so that you can experience different perspectives to help." Whether you are given the opportunity in college, or with your friends and family, going outside your bubble will help you develop and grow as an open-minded individual. 

Published 5/23/23