School Ensures That Day Jobs Don’t Leave Immigrants in Dark

Like thousands of teenage immigrants who cross the border into the U.S. each year, Noe Choxom worked a day job to help his family pay for rent and groceries.

“I didn’t have time for school,” said Choxom, who reached the eighth grade back in his village in Guatemala.

That changed when he saw a Spanish-language television report last year about a Houston high school that accommodated the work schedules of young immigrants. Classes were offered at night and on Saturdays, and held the promise of a high school diploma.

Choxom, now 21, quickly enrolled. “What I’m doing is better for me,” he said during a break at his job at a quick-oil-change shop. “If we have bigger dreams, we can make a better life.”

Open since January 2005, Houston’s Newcomer Charter High School is gearing up for a move in the fall to a new space of its own. Its 185 students currently attend classes in several rooms at Lee High School in southwest Houston.

It was at Lee, where Latinos make up about 75% of the student population, that Principal Steve Amstutz saw firsthand how a traditional school day set up young working immigrants to fail. “It’s an inflexible schedule that forces students to choose between putting food on the table and getting an education,” he said. “That’s an unfair choice for an 18-year-old to have to make.”

School districts elsewhere in the country with the same problem have also experimented with “newcomer schools,” but most meet during the day and focus on English-language skills and core subject areas, said Deborah Short, a senior researcher at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. After a year or two, students transfer to a traditional high school.

Houston’s version provides a full high school curriculum and the time to complete it without the complications of a transfer. Keeping older students together as a group is good for morale, Amstutz said, when the alternative is socially awkward at best.

“If you’re 19 and starting the ninth grade, you’re not going to feel good about sitting next to a 14-year-old. That stinks,” he said.

Amstutz initially looked at the school as a way to get dropouts back into the classroom. But to his surprise, “we recovered almost none. Instead, we found a lot of young people that had never dropped in. They were here in the community but never enrolled in school to begin with.”

Most Newcomer students are Latino, others from Africa or the Middle East. It’s open to recent immigrants ages 17 to 21, but exceptions are made for those who turn 22 as they near graduation.

The school is funded by the state and the local school district and receives some private grants. It generally has four full-time and 16 part-time teachers, with those numbers fluctuating from one semester to the next.

It will award its first diplomas in December, Newcomer Principal Monico Rivas said.

Student Norma Palafox, 22, came from Mexico five years ago with her then-husband. He wanted her to work, not go to school, she said.

As a cashier at Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, she slowly learned to speak English -- “ ‘spicy,’ ‘mild,’ ‘legs,’ ‘thighs’: my first words,” Palafox said. Her growing vocabulary, and a desire for a more promising future, gave Palafox confidence to defy her husband and enroll at Newcomer. The couple divorced last year.

“I have a lot of things in mind to do,” said Palafox, who wants to be an elementary-school teacher. “I had plans before, but not like now. Now I feel like I can do it.”

Her classmate Choxom works across town from the school, but his boss lets him leave in time to fight traffic and make a 5:30 class. Other employers are not as accommodating. Palafox said her supervisor at a cafeteria wouldn’t budge when a change in work hours conflicted with school. “They told me I had to choose between the job and school. I chose school,” she said.

Palafox now cleans houses and baby-sits.

Older students are working against the clock to graduate before they’re too old for public school, math teacher Diane Matos said. Many had stopped their formal education by middle school and are trying to catch up in accelerated classes. “We do what we can in the time that we have,” she said.

The classical music that Amstutz pipes through the school intercom system echoed in the empty halls one recent day when Choxom hurried into the building, laden with books. He is taking a full load this semester: biology, algebra, U.S. history, two English classes and science. Like every other student here, he’ll stay until school lets out at 10 p.m. On Saturdays, classes run from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

“Sometimes it’s hard. You get tired,” Choxom said. “But I think of my future, and I go back every day.”