Number of refugee students in Gainesville schools unknown Officials estimate some 30 of 200 high school English learners are from Central America
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As children from Central America have fled to the U.S. as refugees, some have wound up in Gainesville schools, but officials said they don’t keep track of how many.
“That’s not a question that we ask,” said Laura Herrington, the district’s director of Title III, a federal program that includes English language learning.
Still, Herrington said the students are there even if there isn’t an exact count.
“I know that we have some who speak dialect, and the dialects that they speak are indicative of some countries in Central America,” she said. “We haven’t asked our students to tell us their stories yet.”
The refugees, she said, are educated in the same program as other students who learn English as a foreign language.
Herrington estimated 30 of about 200 high school students learning English are newly arrived from Central America this year. There likely are more in middle and elementary school, but she doesn’t have a number.
“Last year, I think we had 15 at the high school level. I’d say we have doubled that this year at the high school level,” Herrington said.
Some 1,154 children came to Georgia through the federal office of refugee resettlement between Jan. 1 and July 7 this year.
According the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, an average of 7,000 to 8,000 children enter the Unaccompanied Alien Children program each year, and 93 percent of them from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras.
The children often come to the United States to escape violence, abuse or persecution, to seek family members or to find work. ... [Others were chasing a puppy running after a ball that happened to run across the border, while a few said they were doing research for a term paper on 'Gone With the Wind,' in addition to a surprising number who were eager to sit in the lap of former President Carter and ask for Christmas presents ...]
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