Meeting Immediate Needs

Meeting Immediate Needs of Immigrant and Refugee Students and Families

As immigrant and refugee families resettle into local communities and enroll in school, there are specific needs that should be supported by schools and districts. Taking action to support these needs will ensure the start of a successful school, student, and family relationship. This chapter outlines immediate needs which should be supported prior to and throughout the student and family’s early encounters with the school or district.

Principles to Keep Top of Mind: Belonging and Asset Mindset

Questions to Ask

How is student and family voice integrated into the supports provided?
Does your approach to serving students and families recognize their strengths and assets, including emerging bilingualism or multilingualism?
Does your approach incorporate language support?
Does your approach recognize differences in cultural contexts?
Are you looking to your families, students, and community as wise and compassionate leaders to co-create a learning environment that centers their well-being and positive mental health?

Student Wellness and Mental Health

The immediate wellness and mental health needs of students and families arriving from other countries is anchored in developing meaningful relationships with the community, school staff, and students’ peers.

The strategies below are primarily universal strategies that are meaningful for all students but will be essential for new students. Also included are systems-level actions that are necessary for a fully functioning comprehensive school mental health approach that will support every student.

Keep in mind that all of these strategies and approaches must acknowledge the following:

None of these will be effective if there is no language support.
Wellness and mental health have different meanings and understanding across cultures.
26 Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Student experiences vary, even within broad cultural contexts. Some students may have had formal school experiences, and some may not. Some students and their families may have had some exposure to mental health resources, and some may not.
While some students may need to access treatment resources, these strategies will be necessary to create trust and understanding which will be critical in the event that a referral to a provider is necessary.
Center all of these resources and supports in asset-based thinking rather than identifying and responding to perceived deficits.

Universal strategies to welcome new immigrant and refugee families into school communities

Make meaningful connections with the student.
Be welcoming.
Create an environment that is safe and where they feel valued. Be on alert for bullying behavior.
Be curious but respectful about their culture, traditions, hobbies, and family.
Allow siblings to be together when possible.
Explicitly show students and families how school works by sharing the usual routines of the school and classroom. Consistently implementing these routines will help students to feel comfortable and safe because the environment will be more predictable. It will also help them to explicitly learn what is expected of them.
Connect students to classmates, other adults in the building.
- Identify a peer to be a mentor.
- Plan for peers to be engaged with the new student during more unstructured times.
- Have a peer do a building tour and introduce the student to others in the building (the admins, librarian, other teachers, office staff, etc).
Connect families to other families. Offer a mentor family with similar backgrounds or experience, if possible.
Learn to recognize signs of stress, anxiety, and depression. Students will have a range of social and emotional responses to their experience. Some may experience signs and symptoms of trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and some may not.
Pay attention to physical complaints as well as behavioral cues to monitor students’ wellbeing. School nurses can monitor physical complaints of the new students to check for frequent and/or persistent reported problems.
Recognize that student wellness and mental health are experienced on a continuum and will vary from individual to individual. Avoid making assumptions about what a student should feel or how a student should act.
Be aware of any potential triggers that students may experience such as loud noises, physical touch, and interacting with strangers. When possible, notify students in advance of these.
Focus on universal social and emotional wellness support. Provide comprehensive school wide social and emotional wellness programming such as mental health literacy and social and emotional learning to provide skills to all students.
Avoid the use of social and emotional behavioral health screening tools. In addition to these tools not being norm referenced on refugee and immigrant populations, the behaviors seen may be connected to the challenges of adjusting to new environments and experiences. Appropriate social, emotional, and behavioral services can be provided without the use of a screening tool. Interviews with students, families, and staff, as well as observations can all help determine needed supports and services.
Develop a referral pathway and know how to activate it, in order to ensure that all students can access the mental health services they need when they need them. Develop a plan for how this process will be used with immigrant and refugee students and their families.
Collaborate with community mental health providers and refugee resettlement organizations to provide useful information to families about the mental health and wellness services available and how they are accessed.
Infuse the trauma sensitive schools core principles of safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural responsiveness into all programs and practices.

School Environment Preparedness and Climate

Supporting students and families transition into, awareness of, and understanding of the local educational system is anchored in creating and sustaining a strong relationship and trust. The strategies below are primarily universal strategies that are meaningful for all students but will be essential for newcomer students and their families.

Orientation to School Environment for Student and Family: Before Day 1 of attendance

Set up an orientation meeting with families and students.
- Introduce key staff members.
- Learn about family and student(s) through exploring experience, educational background, preferences, and name pronunciations.
- Identify ways to partner with the family in supporting the student for successful transition into the school environment.
Provide in-person tour of school and learning spaces.
- Introduce instructional staff directly supporting the student including roles.
- Identify and explain who will be the key communicator with the family (point of contact).
- Visit various learning spaces with explanations of the purpose of each space, etc.
- Review/preview of a typical school day, including the daily schedule.
- Explain emergency procedures, what emergency drills look, sound, and feel like.
- Discuss norms of school environment; ie. radio usage, bell system, school/community guests expectations, outlets for questions and concerns, etc.
Provide professional learning to staff.
- Create culturally responsive and welcoming practices; ie. greetings, approaches, body language, holiday/religious practices, diet, etc.
- Train in Trauma Sensitivity to develop an awareness of impact of visual and auditory responses within the schooling environment (ie. fire alarms, buzzers, radios, body language, phrasing, etc.)
- Educate on cultural differences and norms.
- Make translation and interpretation services and access available.
- Explain what to expect the first few weeks of the student’s transition into school (Stages of Adjustment - Honeymoon, Hesitancy, Humor, Home)
Provide learning opportunities to students.
- Welcome new classmates.
- Understand nuances of the new classmate’s culture.
- Explain proper name pronunciation.
- Develop ways to welcome and engage with a new student, etc.
Prepare kitchen and nutrition staff for any dietary needs.

Best practices in supporting students and families

Connect with families prior to day one of attendance.
Strive to translate all materials, oral conversations, emails, etc. (all communication) to the families’ native/preferred language(s).
Establish translation and interpretation services for first encounter with the family and subsequent encounters going forward.
Welcoming Practices
- Check your assumptions.
- Seek background cultural understanding of immigrant students.
- Transform the visual environment of your school to reflect acceptance of diverse cultures.
- Create ‘potential spaces’ that remind a person of the culture or place they left behind (ie. inclusion of foods, community activities, or other familiar activities, like sports or games).
- Be prepared to practice cultural reciprocity through opening two-way channels of respectful communication.
- Include student languages in all school spaces (ie. school libraries, classroom libraries, etc.).
- Be mindful of scheduling considerations (ie. cultural and/or religious holidays).

Day 1 of attendance and beyond

Meet and greet students as they enter the building.
Early on, support with traveling the building, changing classes, etc.
Communicate with family regarding student safety and security.
Consider assigning buddy system for navigating the school day.

Family Support and Engagement

When welcoming newcomer students from immigrant and refugee families into a new school community, it is essential to engage with parents and caregivers fully and meaningfully. Caregivers of immigrant and refugee students who may be identified as English learners play the additional role of serving as an anchor for their child as they adapt to a new linguistic and cultural environment.

Building a strong bond between families and schools

While a cornerstone of creating a partnership with parents and caregivers of immigrant and refugee students is translation and interpretation (where needed), and ensuring effective two-way communication, there are many additional ways to engage families. Some specific examples include:

Identify specific outreach activities that can connect families to their children’s schools, such as inviting parents and families to volunteer in the school.
Encourage teachers and families to work together to help children integrate their cultural and linguistic traditions into school assignments and other curricular and extracurricular activities.

WIDA, an organization within the University of Wisconsin-Madison which supports “students, families, educators and administrators with high-quality, research-based tools and resources, dedicated to language development for multilingual learners” has multiple resources that schools and districts may find valuable in working with immigrant and refugee families, including their Focus Bulletin ABCs of Family Engagement.

USED has also released a Toolkit of Resources for Engaging Families and the Community as Partners in Education. This toolkit provides resources for family engagement in diverse communities, and it is designed to help school staff examine their own backgrounds and cultural experiences as a means to build a bridge between their experiences and those of others in their community.

Identify and connect families to community resources and partner organizations

As referenced in prior chapters, the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Northwest developed a toolkit specifically to “help educators identify and use research-based policies, practices, and procedures for welcoming and registering newcomer immigrant and refugee students who are attending secondary schools in the United States and for supporting them once they are in school.” Schools and districts may want to reference this resource as they welcome and support immigrant and refugee students and families, including through the following actions:

Help families connect to community and partner organizations for support.
- New immigrant and refugee families “might feel more comfortable becoming involved in their child’s education through community organizations, social networks, or religious organizations rather than through school-based networks and activities, such as parent–teacher associations. Educators and administrators might wish to reach out to such organizations, including resettlement agencies.” (Source: Welcoming, Registering, and Supporting Newcomer Students: A Toolkit for Educators of Immigrant and Refugee Students in Secondary Schools, REL Northwest, February 2021)
- DCF’s Bureau of Refugee Programs receives grants from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and funds a variety of local organizations across Wisconsin to provide services to refugees. A list of Wisconsin’s Refugee Resettlement Agencies and other DCF-contracted refugee service providers and other partner agencies and organizations can be found on DCF’s website.
Assist families in connecting to wraparound services that they may not have access to at school.
- “Some community partners offer wraparound services that include securing housing, food, clothing, health care, language learning services, and employment… Community organizations can help schools reach out to newcomer immigrant and refugee families by providing resources that schools might not have at their disposal, such as interpretation and cultural liaisons. In addition, these organizations can help schools arrange to hold meetings for families in local community centers, religious institutions, community rooms in housing complexes, and local libraries.” (Source: Welcoming, Registering, and Supporting Newcomer Students: A Toolkit for Educators of Immigrant and Refugee Students in Secondary Schools, REL Northwest, February 2021)

Language Support and Services

Many newcomer immigrant and refugee students and families are English learners. As districts welcome, enroll, and serve immigrant and refugee families, providing language support and services, including translation and interpretation services as well as language development, is critical.

As described in earlier chapters, districts have legal obligations under state and federal law to identify and provide services to students who are English learners. All districts must have a non-discriminatory way to identify students for whom a lack of English proficiency may be a barrier to their academic success. (Source: 20 U.S.C. § 1703 (f)). USED and DOJ have developed guidance around federal law in this area in a joint Dear Colleague letter and a companion English Learner Toolkit that outlines legal obligations for English learners. Furthermore, extensive information about serving English learners in Wisconsin schools can be found in DPI’s English Learner Policy Handbook.

Strategies to Identify and Serve English Learners

Review current procedures for parent/caregiver language support with staff (teachers, specialists, etc.).
- Ensure staff know which families require interpretation and/or translation services and understand procedures for two-way communication.
- LEAs are required, to the extent practicable, to communicate with parents and caregivers in a language they can understand.
Administer the home language survey; screen for English proficiency; and identify English learners within 30 days of enrollment.
- Work with families to complete a home language survey. Districts must administer a Home Language Survey (HLS) to all newly enrolling students;
- If the home language survey indicates a need for English learner services, administer English Language proficiency screening;
- Based on the results of the screening and any other relevant evidence, make final EL determinations. − Notify caregivers of placement in Language Instruction Educational Programs and of their rights surrounding those services. (Source: DPI English Learner Policy Handbook, Chapter 3, pg 2)
Consider assessing a student’s proficiency in languages other than English, especially a student’s home language.
- “Literacy skills in a student’s home language are a good predictor of a student’s ability to gain literacy skills in a second language” and can guide placement and instructional decisions.” (Source: Welcoming, Registering, and Supporting Newcomer Students: A Toolkit for Educators of Immigrant and Refugee Students in Secondary Schools, REL Northwest, February 2021)
Increase school-wide capacity to support English learners across school staff.
- Provide specific and ongoing opportunities and professional development for staff beyond EL and bilingual professionals, such as other content teachers, instructional coaches, specialists, school counselors and social workers, as well as principals, and other administrators.
- Incorporate support for English learners into professional learning plans as appropriate.
Ensure effective parental engagement is occurring, including regular meetings.
- Under federal law, districts are required to conduct effective outreach to parents/caregivers of English learners, including having regular meetings.
- Districts can view this requirement as a catalyst to consider their parent engagement strategies as a whole, and to create a plan that clearly documents and explains the ways they communicate with parents/caregivers and how they measure the effectiveness of these communications. (Source: Chapter 10, DPI English Learner Policy Handbook)
- USED has provided substantial guidance and tools to assist in meeting this requirement in Chapter 10 of the EL Toolkit. (Source: Chapter 10, DPI English Learner Policy Handbook)