Yesterday, Montgomery County school officials announced a pilot program tailored to the specific needs of students such as Lisama: recent immigrants who have had little formal education although they are reaching the age when most native-born Americans graduate from high school.
"Over there, people don't think school is a big deal," Lisama said. "Even if people get their degree, there's no work."
The program, Students Engaged in Pathways to Achievement, would begin this summer at Wheaton High School, a campus serving a large immigrant population, and focus initially on about 15 students in their late teens. Students would be taught functional English, with an emphasis on career-specific vocabulary. Other classes would explore careers, including horticulture, cosmetology and hospitality. Students also would be taught to read and write fluently in their native Spanish.
The program confronts the realities facing teenage immigrants who escape poverty and upheaval in El Salvador and other Latin American nations for a better life in the Washington suburbs. They arrive unable to speak much English, unable to read or write well even in Spanish, with vast gaps in their formal education and too near adulthood to make up for lost schooling.
