San Francisco May Close Newcomer High School

Jill Tucker writes for the San Francisco Chronicle:

For 30 years, San Francisco’s Newcomer High School has been the first stop for thousands of new immigrant teenagers struggling in a new country, often with minimal English skills and sometimes low levels of literacy.

One of the first students to enroll found solace at the school after a tidal wave sank the boat carrying him from Vietnam. He clung to a lifeboat for seven hours and spent 10 days waiting for rescue on an island. The rest of his family died.

Such stories still echo through Newcomer’s halls, but the school – a one-year transitional program for about 160 students – could fall silent by summer.

District officials want to close the school in June and spread students across four to six comprehensive high schools, where they would get English instruction and receive more resources and services.

“They would have greater access to a breadth of courses for graduation and also electives,” said Christina Wong, district special assistant to the superintendent. “If they were interested in music or sports, they would have more access to that.”

Closing Newcomer would be “cost neutral,” Wong said, with the school’s funding reallocated to other high schools to pay for increased new immigrant student services.

Gearing up for a fight
But supporters say the small Inner Sunset school has saved teenagers who otherwise would have been set up to fail, too scared and confused to navigate a high school with 3,000 students. Newcomer students attend the school for a year and then transfer to another school to finish their education.

“Our school is special,” said Newcomer teacher Margaret K. Lee, a 30-year veteran of the school. “We really serve the needs of beginning (English language learners) – the low-skilled students.”

Newcomer’s teachers and current and former students are already gearing up for a fight to save the school. Click here for the rest of the story.

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