Almost 300 migrant students, and counting, are swelling classrooms in the Tukwila School District this year — the children of the hundreds of asylum-seekers who have sought shelter at Tukwila’s Riverton Park United Methodist Church.
Elementary school classrooms are overflowing as teachers accommodate six or seven new students each, in the middle of the school year, raising average classroom sizes. Most of the new students don’t speak either English or Spanish. Some aren’t literate in their home language. Others have been out of school for as long as four years.
The district that normally serves a little less than 3,000 students has welcomed the newcomers with open arms. In part, that’s because they are required by law, but also because they know how. Over the years, Tukwila has served waves of Vietnamese, Nepali, Afghans, Ukrainian and Burmese students, among others.
“I know we overwhelm the schools with kids who have different needs,” said Rev. Jan Bolerjack, the pastor at Riverton Park Church in Tukwila. The church has been housing and assisting hundreds of asylum-seekers that have traveled to the Pacific Northwest since January 2023, driven by the knowledge that one Methodist church south of Seattle will get them help.
“But if any school district in the state knows how to deal with this it’s Tukwila,” said Bolerjack, who served on the Tukwila School Board for six years.
Other districts have taken migrant students, too, including Highline, with 50 new students since January, and Kent, with 12. But by far the largest number has landed in Tukwila.
Despite hiccups with transportation and spurts of bullying when kids first started school, parents say they’re grateful their children have a place to go every day as they work to gain asylum status in the U.S. As the months have passed, they’ve watched their kids adjust to school, and begin to learn English.
“I have good communications and review of teachers,” said a Venezuelan father through a translator.
School staff say it’s easier for the newcomers arriving now than it was for their peers back in the fall because students have formed social groups and help each other with translating.
“They are creating their own kind of systems within our systems,” said Maryan Abdow, one of two quality engagement specialists at the district.
“School gives them a stabilizing place, so I really want them in school,” Bolerjack added.
The translation challenge
Language is the biggest barrier. The majority of the new students speak Portuguese, Spanish, French and Lingala, the language of northwest Congo. They mostly hail from Congo, Angola and Venezuela.
Tukwila teachers have scrambled to copy and paste lesson plans into Google Translate, mediate conflicts using spotty translation services and teach students about how to go to lunch and recess using pictures.
When conflicts arise, students are often sent to Tammy Tauiliili, the lone social worker at Cascade View Elementary, a short walk from Riverton Park Church.
Tauiliili pulls out her cellphone to use the Google Translate app, but “95% of the time it doesn’t work” because of poor cell reception, she said. “It makes me feel bad because sometimes a student is just really trying to tell me something and they are pointing to my phone and I’m trying to get it to work.”
Another option is Language Line, an online on-demand translation service, but it can take longer and feel impersonal.
Tauiliili and other staffers say the students show up to school happy and love being there. But they know these kids have experienced trauma in their home country or during their journey to the U.S. that the district isn’t equipped to handle.
The nonprofit Communities In Schools is providing food and clothing and a social emotional interventionist, new this year. But next year the partnership may be reduced due to COVID-19 relief funds sunsetting in September.
The district has seven family liaisons in charge of communicating with parents who speak a language other than English, but does not have a Portuguese language interpreter — the language spoken by about 44% of the new students.
Gabrielle Oliveira, an associate professor of education and Brazil studies at Harvard University, says the most important skill for teachers is the ability to teach English to nonnative English speakers.
“Expecting every school to be multilingual from the perspective of like 50 languages is … a tough ask,” Oliveira said. Instead, educators should focus on training to help them communicate and “provide scaffolding for children who are just learning English now.”
A parent volunteer, or artificial intelligence, could help in communicating with parents, she said.
The district’s messaging system, Talking Points, can send messages in Portuguese, but parents say it doesn’t translate well.
“The kids have acclimated pretty well but I think it’s been more difficult for the parents,” said Tauiliili.
Oliveira urges teachers to assign students work in their home language so they feel more comfortable and accepted and can share things from their heart, even if it is less rigorous.
“It will establish trust,” Oliveira said. “That’s the key for the parents and the kids to come back to school because otherwise we may start getting lots of cutting class and not coming back.”
Grace Saturnino, a second grade teacher at Cascade View, asks students to share about their culture in class. “That is how we tap into and show their brilliance,” she said.
“(These students) know about the world. They know the troubles and they know the possibilities,” said Bolerjack, the pastor at the Riverton Church.
Saturnino works to differentiate her lesson plans to each migrant student’s needs, but what really helps is when the International Rescue Committee, a social services organization that assists people displaced by humanitarian crises all around the world, comes into her classroom to work directly with her migrant students.
Reteaching classroom norms
When Cascade View got too full, the district started sending migrant students to Thorndyke Elementary. Since January, the school of about 370 students has absorbed an additional 160 students.
Thorndyke Principal Michael Croyle walked into a fourth grade classroom one afternoon in March and saw a student who needed a reminder about keeping his hands to himself. Croyle asked a student who speaks Spanish and English to translate for him.
This happens in almost every classroom at Thorndyke: Students help the adults and their peers translate for their new peers.
Jenny Le, a fourth grade teacher who started the year with 22 students and now has 32, says her multilingual students “notice that I butcher a Spanish word because my Spanish isn’t very good. … I love when they correct me because I want to make sure I say it right.”
“I notice them supporting each other, helping them if they ever need help with reminders or simple translations,” Le added.
Croyle said teachers must constantly revisit classroom rules and norms for the newcomers. And longtime Tukwila students are getting less attention — some have told their parents that they feel neglected.
Some of the teachers have Pocketalks — small devices that resemble a cellphone — that translate in real time. Each costs about $300 and the school only has a handful of them.
The school is partnering with Pine Lake Middle School in Sammamish, which is working to raise money to buy every class a Pocketalk.
The financial challenge
Before these new students arrived, the school district was in a financial crisis and had to enter into “binding conditions” with the state, allowing it to borrow money. It faces an estimated $4.5 million shortfall.
Four other districts in the state are in the same category, and many districts nationwide are facing declining enrollment and budget deficits due to inflation and the impact of the pandemic.
This year, the state provided $250,000 for school districts with a significant increase in asylum-seeking McKinney-Vento students to provide them with extra academic and family support. The McKinney-Vento Act, passed in 1987, requires school districts across the country to identify homeless students and provide them with a free, appropriate public education.
An additional $750,000 will be provided for the 2025 fiscal year.
The district also gets federal money for McKinney-Vento students, but because most of the asylum-seekers arrived recently, the district won’t receive money for them this year.
And, because students might be moved this summer to more permanent housing, the district may never receive McKinney-Vento money for them.
Still, despite the financial pressures, the district is welcoming the newcomers.
“We love having them here at the end of the day,” said Croyle, the principal of Thorndyke. “They are our students. They are part of our community. They have a place called school.”
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