Plan to move Fort Worth’s International Newcomer Academy brings worry about its future

As North Texas prepares to accept larger numbers of refugee families in the coming months, the future of a Fort Worth school for children in those families is in question.

The International Newcomer Academy is a school for middle and high school students who are recent immigrants to the United States and have limited English skills. Fort Worth school officials announced plans earlier this year to move the district’s administrative offices into the building that houses the academy at the beginning of the next school year. Officials haven’t yet determined where the academy will be moved, whether it will remain a single site or if its students will be split up among several campuses.

Many of the academy’s graduates say the safe environment the school provided and the help they got from its teachers were essential during their first months and years in the United States. They, and other supporters of the school, say the district should not split the school up.

“We’re just so afraid that they’ll get lost in the shuffle,” said Whitney Peters, a sixth grade teacher at the school. “And it’s no one’s fault, it’s just the system is not built for our kids.”

Teachers are trained to help refugees, immigrants

Many of the school’s students came into the country as refugees fleeing conflict in their home countries. Students spend one or two years at the school, where teachers help them build English proficiency and work with them on the academic material they’ll need to master to keep up with their peers. Once they finish the program, students transfer to other schools in the district.

Peters said teachers there use a different style of instruction than students would see in other schools. Instruction leans heavily on the sociocultural theory of learning, which holds that learning and development happen during social interactions. English instruction is embedded in the entire curriculum, she said, so students learn the language as they learn other skills.

For example, when students learn to work with fractions in a math class, their teacher might ask them to talk to each other about which number is the numerator and which is the denominator. During those interactions, students not only learn the skill the class is covering, they also get practice using academic language they’ll need to understand later on.

Teachers at the academy are trained to work with newcomers, Peters said. That training is important, because students often have radically different needs from other students in the district. It isn’t unusual for new students to arrive in Peters’ sixth grade class having never gone to school because circumstances in their home countries prevented it.

“The culture is ultimately what you can’t recreate,” Peters said.

Niang Muang, now a nursing student at Texas Christian University, attended the school in 2014 and 2015 after her family came to the United States from Myanmar. Muang hopes the district will keep the school together at a single site. The fact that every student in the school is a newcomer removes much of the pressure students would feel in a normal classroom and allows them to focus on learning, she said. Teachers are endlessly patient with their students, she said. And because every student is learning English, there’s no teasing when a student uses a word incorrectly or makes a grammatical mistake, she said.

“There’s a lot of emotional trauma that comes with that,” Muang said.

Laurent Shumbusha went to the academy in 2013, after his family came to Fort Worth from Zimbabwe. He spoke barely any English when he arrived — only what he’d picked up from TV and movies, he said. When it came time to start school, Shumbusha was anxious. But when he arrived at the academy, he realized that every other student at his school had arrived in the United States relatively recently, and all were in a similar position as he was. That relieved much of the pressure, he said.

“There was nobody laughing at you if you couldn’t speak English,” Shumbusha said.

Shumbusha, now a criminal justice major at TCU, said it wasn’t that difficult for him to learn English at the same time as other subjects like math and social studies because he was able to go at the same pace as other students. He doesn’t think that would have been the case if he were in a regular classroom. He doesn’t understand why the district may split the school apart. It was a good experience for him, he said, and other students felt the same way. He remembers students crying when they graduated from the program because they didn’t want to leave.

Laisha Verdusco, who went to the academy in 2016, said she didn’t think her school experience would have been the same if she hadn’t started at the academy. When her family moved to Fort Worth from Mexico, Verdusco spoke no English. It made simple jobs, like shopping for groceries, hard, she said. But when she started school at the academy, she was part of a community of students who were also struggling to learn English.

That sense of community is crucial for students who have come to the United States recently, she said, because it helps them feel less alone. That connection remains even after students have left the school, she said. Verdusco studies nursing at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix. But because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s back in Fort Worth taking remote courses, so she helps the school’s community and parent coordinator with food donations for students and their families.

Fort Worth school leaders will develop plan

During the district’s January school board meeting, Superintendent Kent Scribner outlined the district’s plan to move both the International Newcomer Academy and Applied Learning Academy out of the converted department store building on Camp Bowie Boulevard that houses both schools. That building will become the district’s new central office. The move is part of a larger plan to decentralize the district’s administrative staff, sending many of them to schools across the district where they’ll be closer to teachers and principals.

Under the plan, Applied Learning Academy students will move to the building that currently houses Rosemont Sixth Grade Center, whose students will move to Rosemont Elementary School. But district officials haven’t yet come up with a plan for the International Newcomer Academy.

At a Feb. 23 board meeting, about 20 people, including several of the academy’s graduates, spoke about the importance of the services the school offers and called on district leaders to keep the school together at a single site. Scribner said the district hadn’t decided whether the school would be at a single site or split among several campuses. He pushed back on speakers’ concerns that the district would shut the school down entirely and try to place its students into regular classrooms before they were ready.

“We’re not going to be mainstreaming students haphazardly,” Scribner said. “You can be sure of that.”

Jerry Moore, the district’s chief academic officer, said in an email that the only decision district officials have made regarding the academy’s future is that it will be in a different building at the beginning of the next school year. District officials are meeting with focus groups this week to discuss possible options, Moore said. Then, the district will convene a team that will develop a plan for where to locate the school and decide whether it will remain at a single site or be split among two or more campuses.

“We know that (the academy) does a great job of supporting our students and we are committed to maintaining the great things that are happening while looking to improve other components of the school,” Moore said. “All options are on the table right now. With the change in location for (the academy), we wanted to take the time to review the program and ensure we support our newcomer students to the greatest extent possible.”

The change comes at a time when refugee advocates in North Texas and nationwide expect to see more families come to the United States. Last month, President Joe Biden proposed raising refugee admissions to 62,500 for the current budget year, more than four times the record-low limit of 15,000 imposed by President Donald Trump.

Zoe Wilkerson, area director of the nonprofit Refugee Services of Texas’ Fort Worth office, said her agency has been notified that 16 or more refugee families are expected to arrive in Fort Worth within the next month. Historically, the Dallas-Fort Worth area has received about a third of the refugees resettled in Texas, which accepts more refugees than any other state, she said.

Wilkerson said the International Newcomer Academy has been helpful to refugee families because it allows their children to catch up with their peers, both in terms of their English proficiency and their understanding of course material, before they’re placed in a regular classroom.

School’s students speak dozens of languages

Kip Wright, a former teacher at the academy, said he thought it would be difficult, if not impossible, to re-imagine the school in a form that’s as successful as it is now. He doubts that district officials had students’ needs in mind when they decided to make the move.

Wright taught social studies at the school from 2012 to 2016. He worries about what would happen to the academy’s students if the school were divided up among several sites, especially as more refugee families come to the United States. He also worries about how a divided International Newcomers Academy would affect the district’s ability to handle a sudden influx of refugee students if a major humanitarian crisis happens somewhere in the world.

During his time at the school, he worked with students from dozens of countries, each with its own languages. He had Congolese students who spoke Swahili or French. There were students from Angola who spoke Portuguese and others from Myanmar who spoke Burmese or any of several regional languages spoken there. Wright suspects some of the district’s decision-makers assume they could place the academy’s students into any school with a large population of Spanish speakers and expect them to fare just as well.

But the fact that many of the academy’s students have either limited schooling or none at all means their needs are different from those in a typical classroom, Wright said. He remembered working with a Congolese student who’d never been taught that the Earth revolves around the sun. Students like him could easily get left behind in a regular classroom, he said. But at the academy, they work with teachers who are better equipped to help them, Wright said.

The academy’s students generally don’t have friends or relatives already living in the United States who can help them get established, so they rely more heavily on social services and other help, Wright said. The school’s leaders work with a network of church groups, volunteers and other supporters they can call on to help students and their families. Having the school in a single site allows those supporters to focus their efforts in a single place, he said. If the school were split among several sites, the attention of those supporters would be divided, and some needs could go unmet, he said.

Peters, the sixth grade teacher, compared the school to swimming lessons. If the district placed newcomers into regular schools, it would be like throwing them into the deep end of a swimming pool, alone, before they knew how to swim. Eventually, a lifeguard would come and pull them out, but then they’d be thrown in again and left to fend for themselves.

But the academy is like placing students in the shallow end of the pool with a swim instructor, she said. Even in a supportive environment with lower risks, learning to swim isn’t easy, just like becoming proficient in English isn’t easy. But with those supports in place, she said, students are better able to learn and build on the knowledge and skills they’ve mastered.