Board members attributed the drastic enrollment decline to several factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, lower birth rates and an aging local population.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat can you do? You can\u2019t manifest children out of nowhere,\u201d said Christian Solorio, a governing board member and longtime district resident, during the Feb. 12 school board meeting.<\/p>\n
The school, which taught 216 immigrant students at its peak, enrolled only 22 students this academic year, including some who were not immigrants or refugees.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Valencia Principal Lynette Wegner said she believes the school\u2019s enrollment decline is connected to immigration reform: \u201cThere is nothing we could have done.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wegner echoed the district\u2019s report from a Jan. 22 meeting, which stated that \u201cin Alhambra Elementary School District, family mobility related to immigration has had a more pronounced impact on enrollment than in many neighboring districts, based on withdrawal reasons shared directly by families.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Under federal actions stemming from Executive Order 14161, President Donald Trump imposed full entry restrictions on 19 countries, with another 20 \u2013 including Cuba and Venezuela \u2013 facing partial suspension.<\/p>\n
Lingering trauma, lasting personal impact<\/strong><\/p>\n Valencia tracks student English proficiency through the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment, or AZELLA.<\/p>\n From January to December\u00a0 2024, students\u2019 English-speaking growth rate increased by over 50% at Valencia, while other newcomer students throughout the district grew by only 34%.\u00a0<\/p>\n In her eight years of leading the school, Wegner said she learned something important: \u201cYou can’t learn content until your body is ready to learn and all your other needs have been met.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Wegner remembers instances at Valencia that exposed the traumatic events some students had lived through at a young age, like a young boy banging his head on the ground, or a student running out of the classroom and screaming when the fire alarm rang, or a child bringing a knife to school out of fear for their safety.\u00a0<\/p>\n Each year, Wegner\u2019s staff undergoes trauma-informed training through the Arizona ACEs Consortium, a process that researchers have said is crucial for working with vulnerable populations.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe just had to look at our children differently and find out what we can do to prevent things like that from happening,\u201d she said, adding that this helps the staff remain \u201caware of triggers\u201d and stay \u201cproactive in making sure that we could support those students.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In these sessions, Wegner said, one of the most important shifts in thinking would be turning \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with you?\u201d into \u201cWhat happened to you?\u201d<\/p>\n \n \u201cThe staff that worked here wanted that support,\u201d Wegner said. \u201cThey knew that it was going to help them help the students who were in front of them. They were invested in every child.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For immigrant and refugee communities, having a family-like group within their first years after relocating isn\u2019t just a convenience.<\/p>\n A study published by the Current Epidemiology Reports journal showed<\/a> that Latino immigrants, for example, tend to create social networks where shared cultural norms and behaviors lessen the stress of navigating broader foreign systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n Another study found<\/a> that immigrants involved in migrant-based community organizations felt \u201ccomplete and empowered in the wider community.\u201d<\/p>\n A child\u2019s reality<\/strong><\/p>\n Wegner sits in her office, reminiscing on her memories as principal, as she looks up at an inaugural 2018 class picture.\u00a0<\/p>\n Her shelves contain copies of \u201cJourneys,\u201d a picture book written and illustrated by her former students. Inside the book, next to a hand-drawn picture of the children\u2019s experiences are their stories in their native languages and in English.<\/p>\n Wegner hired Priscilla Varela, a therapist with trauma-informed practices.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery student loved Ms. Priscilla,\u201d she said. \u201cThey wanted to share their joys with her just as much as their worries.\u201d<\/p>\n And the service went beyond the classroom.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was taking families to hospitals if they needed care,\u201d Wegner said. \u201cIn fact, I had to really advocate for our district to give her a budget for her transportation costs because she was taking families to appointments just as much as she was supporting their kids here at school.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Creating a support network that extends far beyond grades and test scores became one of the priorities for Valencia and the district, said Lupe Conchas, vice president of the Alhambra Elementary School District governing board.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve invested in counselors and social workers in Alhambra,\u201d he said. \u201cThose counselors and social workers and parent volunteer coordinators have been working with families to teach them how to ride the bus, teach them how to write a resume \u2026 just the basic skills in order for them to be successful.\u201d<\/p>\n Through an extended web of partnerships with nonprofits such as the Welcome to America Project and the Be Kind Project, staff often took a one-on-one approach with newcomers, first asking if they had everything they needed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s a whole crew of people that come on Saturday with a moving truck and furnish their homes and put pictures and help teach them how to use the materials, cleaning supplies,\u201d Wegner said.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Moving forward<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cMy hope for the future is that one day we will have a need for another Valencia Newcomer School,\u201d said Conchas. \u201cWe will have policies in this country that allow for people who are fleeing tumultuous countries or unstable governments to be able to find a home here and be able to establish their families and go to a public school and have the support and the love just like (at) the Valencia Newcomer School.\u201d<\/p>\n The closure left the attendees at the Feb. 12 meeting with tear-filled eyes as the governing board members made their final decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a group of people whose first experience here in America was Valencia, and that\u2019s very important,\u201d said Wegner.\u00a0<\/p>\n Valencia students are already being transferred to other schools within the district. School board officials say resources once given to Valencia will be dispersed throughout Alhambra.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe move forward,\u201d said Derek DeVelder, executive director of Abounding Service, one of Valencia\u2019s community partners. \u201cWe move forward with the ache and the knowledge of the loss and the knowledge of that light not being there and the memory of what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on Cronkite News<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Leah Bowers | Cronkite News PHOENIX \u2014 A specialized school designed to acclimate immigrant children to the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":639264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5131],"tags":[5229,5643,1587,1589,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-639263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-phoenix","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-arizona","10":"tag-az","11":"tag-phoenix","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116189449893927090","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/639264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}