Child migrants often miss months or even years of schooling on their turbulent journeys.
Pastor-run shelters have partnered with educators to help — either busing children to an alternative school that teaches everything from math to reading to dealing with emotions, or bringing in specially accredited teachers.migrant relief efforts at the border.
“They say the teacher always takes good care of them, plays with them,” Rodas said. “They feel safe there.”, known for ministering to the poor, who was assassinated during his country’s civil war and later made a saint by Pope Francis. Many housed at this shelter and elsewhere in Ciudad Juarez fled Central America; growing numbers of Mexican families from areas engulfed in cartel warfare are arriving, too.
About three dozen children from Casa Oscar Romero and another religious-run shelter attend Casa Kolping. First to third graders like Carol gather in one classroom, and fourth to sixth graders like Victor meet across the hallway in a large room whose windows frame views of El Paso’s mountains.Across the border, Victor imagines, schools will be “big, well-cared for," and will help him reach his goal of becoming an architect.
“Why all that paperwork if the kid is going to be gone in two weeks” is one argument that makes promoting child migrant education such a challenge, said Paola Gómez, Mexico’s education officer for UNICEF. The U.N. child protection agency helps finance Casa Kolping as a pilot program, where attendance gets a kid transferable credit for both Mexican and U.S. schools.
Ten-year-old Aritzi Ciriaco, a fourth grader from Michoacan who had been at Buen Samaritano since August with her parents and grandparents, couldn’t wait to get started on the day’s Spanish exercises. She worried that learning English and navigating U.S. schools would be hard once they cross the border.
“We are faced with all kinds of falling behind,” said Garcia at Casa Kolping. “But most of all, with a lot of desire to learn. They missed school. When you give them their notebooks, the emotion on their face … some even tell you, ‘How lovely it feels to learn.’”One chilly spring morning, one of her students, Juan Pacheco, 12, struggled with a punctuation exercise taught in Spanish — his first language is Mixtec, one of the many Indigenous tongues in Mexico and Central America.
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