Valeria Caamaño-Pichardo emigrated from Mexico to Gwinnett County with her parents when she was five years old. It was 1999, “right when there was starting to become a huge influx of Mexican immigrants,” she recalls. 

When her parents enrolled her in public school in Buford, she spent part of the day learning English with four to five other students, and the rest of the day with a larger group of peers. So began a journey that would lead her back to the county’s schools more than two decades later, this time as a high school teacher specializing in ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages). 

Caamaño-Pichardo knows how challenging it can be to get an education in an unfamiliar country and language, and wants to help students in this situation overcome a series of challenges and get their high school diplomas. 

“It’s very sad,” she said. “People have worked so hard to get here, and not being able to accomplish the minimum needed to succeed in this society—which is a high school diploma—makes me frustrated.” 

These challenges have been developing during Caamaño-Pichardo’s lifetime. Over the last quarter-century, the Hispanic population in Gwinnett has more than tripled, to nearly 1 in 4 people, while the non-Hispanic white population, once the majority, is now nearly 1 in 3. 

Originally drawn to the Atlanta metro area to build stadiums and housing for the 1996 Olympics, Hispanics settled in Gwinnett to work in the county’s commercial and residential construction boom. People from dozens of other countries speaking a variety of languages have also moved to the sprawling county of about a million residents, making Gwinnett the most diverse county in the Southeast. 

Effects of this decades-long transformation can be seen today in the county school system, where a significant share of students—in addition to juggling their regular course load—must also learn English. One statewide obstacle is that, unlike 31 other states in the U.S., Georgia does not offer standardized tests for subjects like math and science in students’ native languages, according to a 2020 report from the Migration Policy Institute. This can lead to lower scores because “students cannot demonstrate their knowledge in English, a language they are not yet fluent in,” the report notes.

Learning English and satisfying all the requirements needed to graduate is a challenge that many migrant students struggle to overcome: Multilingual learners, as the Gwinnett school district calls them, are graduating at lower rates than the general population.

Nearly 1 in 4 students at Norcross High School in the 2022-2023 academic year were English learners; about 69 percent of them graduated within four years. (Norcross is the city in Gwinnett with the second-highest share of Hispanics, after nearby Lilburn.) 

At another Norcross public high school, Meadowcreek, more than 38 percent of students are English learners; about 75 percent of them graduate within four years. Numbers for both high schools fall below the graduation rate for Gwinnett County as a whole, near 82 percent, and the state’s, just over 84 percent. 

The reasons students don’t graduate vary. Some face familial pressure to help pay the bills, sometimes even working 40 hours a week in addition to going to school. Some have moved to the area without their parents, and lack parental support. Some struggle academically, attending classes in overcrowded classrooms or taking elective courses with teachers who have little preparation for teaching students learning English. Even those who persist can get frustrated by being held back a grade, making graduation harder to reach. 

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“When they told me I had to repeat the 11th grade, I was sad”

When Skarlet Molina moved to Norcross from Maracaibo, Venezuela, with her parents and younger sister in January 2022, she had been a senior about to graduate high school. However, due to the amount of credits required to graduate in Georgia, her current school, Meadowcreek High School, required Molina, now 19, to repeat part of her sophomore year once and her junior year twice.

Older students who arrive to Gwinnett from non-English-speaking countries need to satisfy a certain number of credits in different areas of the curriculum in order to graduate. This results in some students needing to start at a lower grade level than they were at in their home countries, or even having to repeat grades.

Molina found out about being held back as a junior a second time the day before the 2023-2024 school year began, when she went to a counselor to get her course list. “When they told me I had to repeat eleventh grade, I was sad,” said Molina. “I went crazy! I got home and cried.” 

Molina said her parents lifted her up, pushing her to continue to graduation. Her mother, who was a dentist in Venezuela, cleans houses now. Her father, who was a fruit and vegetable supplier, washes cars. 

Molina, who will be 20 years old when she graduates high school in 2025, wants to become an orthodontist. Until then, she’ll spend most of her days actually outside Meadowcreek High School, studying in trailers crammed with “multilingual learners,” before most of her senior year classes bring her inside the Meadowcreek building.

“You’re with Hispanics all the time,” said Molina, of her classes outside. “It would be better to be inside the school with everyone else, because everyone speaks English. It would be easier to learn.” 

Molina says that one of her friends, who is from Mexico, was also required to repeat the 11th grade due to issues with satisfying the required amount of credits. Molina tried to encourage her to stay in school, but her friend grew frustrated and dropped out.

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“They need a paycheck”

Many of Molina’s peers work after school. “I’ve seen them in class, tired, with bags under their eyes,” she said. “They’d rather work than study; they believe they’re getting ahead that way.” 

Molina noted another difference between her situation and that of some of her fellow ESOL students: “They’re with their siblings or other families. They don’t have their parents with them. They don’t have support or motivation.”  

“They’ve probably been placed behind a grade. They feel a little out of place; they almost feel like it’s unnecessary to continue.”

 Luis Andino, Norcross resident

Belisa Urbina is CEO of Ser Familia, an organization that provides mental health and other services to Hispanic families, couples and youth. She says that immigrant parents often work long hours; this, along with language barriers, makes it hard for them to keep up with their children’s schooling: “Parents are working two or three jobs to survive, and they can only do so much.” 

Children in immigrant families also “acquire responsibilities at an early age that aren’t appropriate,” Urbina said, such as interpreting for their parents at a visit to the doctor. In such cases, she said, children may wind up missing school to carry out such duties.

But the cost of living, coupled with low wages and the need to help family living in their home countries means that many of their children also feel like they “have a responsibility to work,” says Luis Andino, Norcross resident since the 1990s. As managing director of youth services at the Latin American Association, he oversees a weekly after school program at Meadowcreek, which some ESOL students attend. This has allowed him to get to know some of their issues and concerns. 

“They’ve probably been placed behind a grade,” said Andino, about these students. “They feel a little out of place; they almost feel like it’s unnecessary to continue.” 

Research has suggested that the more hours high school students work, the more negative the impact on their education, with one study concluding that “serious involvement in part-time work has a negative effect on school grades, even after taking into consideration the effects of family, along with students’ educational aspirations, engagement in learning, effort, and school motivation.”

“They need a paycheck, and may have loved ones back in their countries who they help support,” said Andino.

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“Students need representation”

Brian Westlake, president of the Gwinnett County Association of Educators and a high school social studies teacher, says the county didn’t adequately prepare in the early 2000s for the influx of students who need to learn English. 

“I don’t think they focused . . . on developing the capacity to address the challenges in serving this population,” said Westlake. “Class sizes in English for Speakers of Other Languages programs are huge, and they need to hire more [teachers].”

It’s not just recruitment that presents a challenge for schools but retention too: Veteran ESOL teachers at some schools are leaving, according to Westlake. He said they feel that “the administration is not supporting their efforts”—such as not hiring sufficient support staff, like counselors, which then over-burdens teachers.

Dr. Tarece Johnson-Morgan, a Gwinnett County School Board member whose district includes  the Norcross area, believes graduation rates for students learning English are lower in part because students don’t have enough teachers who understand their culture and speak their language. 

“Students need representation,” Johnson-Morgan said. “We’re not meeting the cultural needs of the child.” 

Johnson-Morgan highlighted an effort underway to hire bilingual ESOL teachers from Puerto Rico, a ready source of Spanish-speaking professionals who are also U.S. citizens.

Having teachers from the same demographics as students contributes to students “report[ing] higher levels of personal effort, happiness in class, feeling cared for, student-teacher communication, post-secondary motivation, and academic engagement,” according to a 2016 study.

Caamaño-Pichardo said it’s important for the district to hire more ESOL teachers but it’s also important that all teachers better understand these students, since those who teach elective courses also interact with them. 

Caamaño-Pichardo recalled a training session last fall at a Gwinnett high school where an ESOL teacher spoke to an auditorium full of her peers who weren’t certified to teach students learning English—in Romanian. She went on for several minutes, as teachers in the audience exchanged confused expressions. Then, she switched to English, making her point: This is what English-language learners are experiencing in school every day.

In addition to teaching American literature to ESOL students, Caamaño-Pichardo is working on a project for more experienced teachers to mentor newer ones, with the hope it will help make them more likely to stay in the field. 

She said the fact that students learning English face so many challenges makes her frustrated and angry. “But it also makes me more determined.”

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Editors: Heather Buckner and Christina Lee

Fact Checkers: Janat Batra and Muriel Vega

Canopy Atlanta Reader: Stephanie Toone