Portraits of Passage

Long Island City, N.Y.

In a sparse school library, teacher Debra Gerstman competes with the sound of bulldozers cracking slabs of concrete to expand a nearby subway line. Seven students--from China, Ecuador, Bulgaria, Pakistan, and Romania--sit around an L-shaped table, snatching shy glances at each other. Two have been in the United States for eight months--the longest of any in the group--others less than a week.

“We are all in New York City. You are here now,” Gerstman says, pointing to a map of the United States. The group is here for new-student orientation, which on this October day includes a look at New York as a city of immigrants. The day’s icebreakers are listed on the chalkboard behind her: immigrants, ethnic groups, main food, and main religion. Gerstman makes her way around the room, asking each student to take a stab at describing the customs of his or her homeland.

The exercise gets a little complicated when one young man tries to answer Gerstman’s question about the principal foods eaten in his home country of Pakistan. He responds with two words: pita bread. But when Gerstman presses him to explain his answer to the rest of the group, he simply shrugs his shoulders. The task then falls to Gerstman.

“Hmm, let’s see. How do you describe pita bread? Um, like a pocket,” Gerstman says, pantomiming opening and closing the bread with its imaginary filling.

When she asks the Bulgarian student about his country’s food, he just squirms in his seat, eyes fixed on the ceiling as he burrows into an oversized windbreaker. “OK. OK. I know it’s hard to express it in English for now,” Gerstman says smiling, turning back to the chalkboard. “You’ll learn.”

This is Newcomers High School: Academy for New Americans, a public high school exclusively for recently arrived immigrants. Its mission is not only to teach the teenagers key academic subjects and English skills but to smooth the transition into American schools and society for students and their families. That task is as simple as teaching students survival English--how to call 911, how to ride the subway to school, or how to use a pay phone--and as complex as helping families rebuild after years of separation.

New York officials opened Newcomers High in the borough of Queens last fall, in the thick of anti-immigrant sentiment seeping through many parts of the country. But the city’s ethnic soup has fostered a more pro-immigrant stance. In fact, city school officials have already expanded the newcomer concept. They opened a newcomer middle school in September right across the street from the high school. And there may be more to come in other areas of the city.

Newcomers High was born of necessity, at least in part to provide relief to some of the city’s most overcrowded high schools in Queens. Since many of the new students streaming into the borough’s high schools are newly arrived immigrants, Newcomers High was the right answer at the right time, says Queens High Schools Superintendent Margaret Harrington. As a matter of policy, enrollment at Newcomers High will never top 1,000 students; neighboring schools house three or four times that number.

Any Queens student who has lived in the United States for less than a year, has limited English skills, and has never attended an American high school is eligible to enroll at Newcomers High. Parents and students are also free to choose from the borough’s 31 other high schools. Students who enter Newcomers High in 9th or 10th grade can stay for a year but then must move on to a regular high school. Students who start in 11th or 12th grades may graduate from Newcomers High, which offers a full range of academic courses--from chemistry and social studies to English and algebra. The academic program at Newcomers High is intended to put students on track to graduate with the state’s more rigorous diploma--which in New York state’s dual system means one certified by the board of regents.

Queens is one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the nation. Some 36 percent of its residents are foreign born--the third-highest percentage among all U.S. counties. The No. 7 train, which rumbles past the high school on its path across northwest Queens, is dubbed the International Express. The Korean Philippo Presbyterian Church, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, and the Luso-Brazilian Seventh-day Adventist Church all stand within a two-block radius of the school. The red neon sign of the Swingline staple factory, a testimony to the neighborhood’s industrial roots, is visible from the school’s upper floors.

Newcomer school growth nationally has been decidedly ad hoc and poorly tracked. New York’s Newcomers High is one of the most recent additions to an existing collection of such schools around the country--from San Francisco to Fort Worth, Texas. A 1990 report counted at least 17 school districts in California with newcomer programs. And newcomer schools have been discussed in recent years in such places as Seattle and Providence, R.I.

Some newcomer programs are centers within an existing school; others are separate schools of their own. Some serve elementary school children, others only teens. Some keep students for a few weeks, others for a semester or a year. A standard definition for newcomer schools does not exist. Generally, the schools try to meet the psychological and social needs of immigrant students and their families in addition to teaching students English and basic academic subjects.

But the schools are not without their critics. Civil rights advocates charge that the schools unnecessarily segregate and stigmatize immigrant children and run the risk of becoming dumping grounds. Such schools, critics say, also absolve the larger school system of responsibility for educating immigrant children. (See “Verdict Still Out,” in This Week’s News.)

What little research does exist on newcomer programs notes that even more established schools like San Francisco’s Newcomer High--which dates back to 1979--have not tracked how students fare after they enter the mainstream for which the newcomer school has theoretically prepared them.

But at the very least, supporters of such programs say, newcomer students find themselves in a school with teachers who want to teach them. Where students don’t have to fear being ridiculed for not speaking English. Where no one has a leg up because everyone is new. And where immigrant students are not marginalized in the life of school because the newcomer school exists solely to serve them.

“All teachers supposedly care about these kids,” says Newcomers High teacher Daniel Sheehan. “But these kids are our only kids.”

Early morning outside the red-brick turn-of-the-century school brings yeasty smells from the muffin and bakery shop it faces. The school’s decidedly typical exterior belies what happens inside. The pace at Newcomers High is fast and frenzied.

The roughly 630 students streaming through the school’s doors hail from more than 40 countries and speak 28 languages, making for a cacophony of sounds that bounce off the building’s bright blue walls. outside the second-floor library. A Bengali girl rushing through the side door sports a blue satin Yankees jacket over a delicately embroidered sea-green sari, a literal layering of cultures.

After the bell rings to mark the start of school, the halls are desolate. No hanging out. No graffiti on the walls. No papers or gum wrappers on the floors. Spotless tile bathrooms.

Security guards at the front entrance seem to have little to do other than chase down the occasional parent who enters for the first time without stopping to sign the visitor logbook. Discipline problems are virtually nonexistent. The two most notable incidents to date have stemmed from culture clashes. Last year, a Spanish-speaking student called a Korean classmate a “chino"--a term many Spanish speakers use generically to refer to people with Asian features. The Korean student took offense and punched the other student. The other conflict arose when a student from Bangladesh pulled a razor blade from his pocket to sharpen a pencil in class--a routine act in his home country but against school weapon rules in New York City. He was suspended for a few weeks, then let back into class.

Though not by design, many of the high school’s teachers and staff members have worked abroad or are themselves immigrants. They speak a combination of almost 30 languages. Take Principal Lourdes Burrows, who moved from Cuba at age 13 to Miami. Or Russian science teacher Svetlana Livdan, who arrived from Ukraine in 1991. Math teacher Miguel Pineda came to New York alone from El Salvador at age 15 as many years ago. Sheehan, a social studies teacher and Bronx native, has worked in Romania for the U.S. State Department. And the school boasts a contingency of Peace Corps alumni, too.

Svetlana Livdan’s chemistry class settles in behind long wooden tables coated with thick brown paint. The class is taught in English, but with so many languages spoken among the staff--one teacher alone speaks Romanian, German, Bengali, Russian, Spanish, and some French--students can almost always find help with translation. Glossaries of common terms are also available to students in a number of languages so they can translate for themselves, too.

Not all courses are taught in English. The school offers core subjects--such as social studies and science--in the most prevalent languages: Spanish, Chinese, and Bengali. Should large numbers of new ethnic groups show up here, the bilingual classes would change to keep pace.

Although Livdan is a science teacher by training, she and other teachers at Newcomers High use English-as-a-second-language methods to teach classes where students routinely speak up to a dozen languages. Livdan stops a video frequently to repeat concepts for students. When she assigns homework, she urges students to readthe chemistry passages a few times, dictionary or glossary in hand.

As the students take turns reading aloud from their chemistry book, Livdan gently helps Justyna Kaczmarczyk pronounce “natural radioactivity” when she stumbles over it, visibly frustrated. Livdan then asks Justyna to describe the work of scientist Marie Curie, who, like Justyna, was born in Poland. The 16-year-old’s face brightens as she describes Curie’s discovery of radium and her subsequent Nobel Prizes.

Justyna and her mother arrived in New York in May, leaving her younger brother and sister, her grandmother, and her basketball team behind in Cracow. Her father had left for New York six years earlier. Neither she nor her mother had seen him since the day he left, other than on the videotapes or photos he would send from time to time.

Although Justyna studied English in school in Cracow, she was so nervous about starting high school here that she took a private English class over the summer. Tucked in her backpack, she keeps a small plastic album with photos of the friends she’s made at a computer class she takes in Brooklyn twice a week.

When Justyna is not at computer class, playing basketball, or doing homework, she’s helping her mother organize their new apartment and the room set aside for her younger siblings, who are awaiting visas. “It is very hard for me because I miss so much my brother and sister,” Justyna says. “But I wanted to be with my parents, too. And I like this school. Everyone knows me. Everyone is same.”

In room 102, Angie Margiotta is practicing what she calls the Marcel Marceau method of teaching English in her ESL 1 class--the school’s most basic level. Pantomime becomes key. English labels cover most everything in the room: door, speaker, blackboard, closet, light switch.

As Margiotta hands back homework, Polina Ikaeva from Russia leans over to Deyvi Urena from the Dominican Republic. She shows him the check mark on her paper.

“Is good?” she asks. “Yes, look,” Deyvi says, as he flips his sheet over and writes an X. “This, bad.”

“Oh. Yes,” she says, uncrossing her feet to reveal spotless white Fila tennis shoes.

On the other side of the room, a new student tries out his electronic translator, which many of his Chinese peers use in class. Punch in a word in English and it spits it out in Mandarin or Cantonese. Even slang. Hit “D” and you get: double cross, drop dead, dogeared, dead on arrival.

Down the hall, ESL teacher Heather Parris-Fitzpatrick teaches an elective class called “Accent Reduction.” It’s one of about two dozen rotating minicourses students take every Wednesday. Her students hold a piece of paper in front of their mouths--sending it fluttering when they emit the “p” sound but keeping it still with “b.” In a scene vaguely reminiscent of “My Fair Lady,” Parris-Fitzpatrick leads the class in a voice thick with her native Queens accent: “It was by far the best ballgame of the season.”

Teacher Jordan Sandke spends most of the time in his music class re-explaining what an outline is. Today, his students were supposed to turn in outlines for a report on musical styles from their home countries and the various functions music serves there. As he walks around the room collecting papers, he pauses to look at Gustavo Pressanto’s work. “Good outline. Oh, it’s in Portuguese,” he says, eyes squinting behind his glasses. “OK.”

As his students file out of the room dotted with posters of Beethoven, the Beatles, and Tejano music star Selena, Sandke shakes his head with a smile. “You just hope it gets through. It’s hard to tell sometimes. You just repeat and repeat,” he says. “And you hope they open up enough to tell you they don’t get it.”

A small school like Newcomers High, tailor-made for immigrant students, has a better shot at meeting their needs than regular schools, supporters say. And those needs can seem endless.

Hygiene is an issue. Gym class is not just talking about the rules of basketball but about showering with soap and using deodorant and a clean towel. Some students emigrated from places where soap is costly and the whole family uses one towel. Sheehan even keeps cheap knock-off designer colognes and deodorant in his office for opportune “teachable moments.”

“We’ll talk about it in social studies class--what we do to keep healthy and clean here,” Sheehan says. “And that in American culture, people don’t like certain smells. But it’s low key.”

Last year, during a bitter New York winter, some students showed up without winter jackets. Others came in traditional sandals. School staff members started up a kind of impromptu flea market with coats, sweat suits, and other cold-weather gear. “Kids just paid what they could, $1 or $2. Or we’d say, ‘Hey, I’ve got these sweatshirts. Take them to anyone you think might need them,’” says Diana Cabot, who wears multiple hats as the school’s physical education teacher, student activities coordinator, and peer mediator.

The school has set aside a quiet room so students, mostly Muslim, can fit in their multiple daily prayers without having to leave school for mosque. The cafeteria--besides serving up such standard institutional fare as chicken nuggets and tater tots--always has peanut butter and jelly on hand for students whose customs prohibit them from eating certain meats.

Academically, a few Newcomers High students arrive with gaps in their education, their learning having been interrupted by political strife in their homelands or stunted by the limitations of rural schools. A handful are pre-literate: They have not yet mastered reading and writing in their native language, let alone English.

At the other end of the spectrum are classmates who arrive with an advantage. These students come from schools where classes were taught in English, even though they may have spoken their native language at home. Last year’s test scores at Newcomers High show students performing at or above average in areas such as math and social studies compared with other Queens high school students.

Emotional concerns--on top of the typical teenage turbulence--also surface at school. Some students never wanted to leave their country. Others were sent on by parents to live with relatives they may have never known before.

Khondoker Haque, 17, came to New York from Bangladesh on June 24 to live with his uncle, who owns a deli and market in Astoria. Khondoker’s father died suddenly in Bangladesh a few months after he arrived in New York, but his uncle didn’t tell him about it until after he started school at Newcomers High, for fear he might become too upset to continue his studies.

Still other students have been reunited with their parents after years of separation, like Abraham Kwarteng from Ghana. As a young boy, Abraham’s parents sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Accra, the capital, to take advantage of the school system there. Two of his siblings lived with his mother in a more remote village. A third lived with grandparents in another community. His father had left for New York years before--so long ago that the 15-year-old doesn’t remember when exactly. “When we arrived at JFK Airport, we couldn’t even recognize him, but he recognized us,” Abraham says of the father he is now getting to know.

A yellowed American flag hangs in the school’s front office. Colored signs spell out the New York City board of education’s nondiscrimination policy in six languages. Some students are referred to Newcomers High by overcrowded neighborhood schools when they go to register there. Others heard of the school through churches, grocery stores, community agencies, and foreign-language newspapers, which have reported extensively on it.

“OTC,” says registrar Yvonne Cabot, looking up from her desk as a woman and her son walk into the office. The number of OTCs--over-the-counter registrants--has slowed by late October but will likely pick up again after the winter holidays. The boy, wearing a NY Giants cap, has recently arrived from Brazil. He and his mother, who speaks some English, have brought his Brazilian passport, an electric bill, and immunization records. But when Cabot asks for a transcript, the mother’s forehead wrinkles.

“Transcript? What is this?” she asks, and Cabot explains, partly in Spanish, partly in English. This transaction, it turns out, is fairly simple. But it often takes months for students to track down transcripts from their home countries, which then have to be translated into English to determine what credits the student can receive toward graduation. The school does not yet know, for example, whether Abraham Kwarteng from Ghana is a sophomore or junior because his transcript has not yet arrived.

Earlier in the day, a few Haitian students who spoke only Creole and French came to register with essentially no identification or information on past schooling. The school’s French-speaking teachers were out, so Cabot had to pull a student from class to translate.

When a young woman swathed in a saffron-colored sari arrives to register, Cabot assumes the man escorting her is the woman’s relative or legal guardian. He is, it turns out, the student’s husband from Bangladesh and most likely, Cabot says, the product of an arranged marriage for the young woman.

On a rainy fall night, about a dozen parents show up for the school’s first parent meeting of the year. As the moms and dads file in, shaking out their umbrellas, Margiotta works her way around the room passing out a parent handbook and offering doughnut holes decorated brown and orange for Halloween. The parents nibble tentatively.

Teacher and program coordinator Mary Burke explains the concept behind the PTA and why the school depends on parent involvement. Last year’s parent meetings included seminars on New York City laws, educational opportunities for students and parents, and immigration and citizenship. The meetings are usually translated into a few main languages.

While Principal Burrows is fond of saying her school is “democracy in action,” it clearly does not always come easy. When Burke and the other teachers ask for volunteers to run as PTA officers, there are no takers. Democracy temporarily gives way to oligarchy as the teachers “recruit” parents.

Burrows hopes that more will follow the example of one parent whose child attended Newcomers High last year. That parent now serves on the PTA at neighboring William Cullen Bryant High School--a measure of empowerment she wants to build in immigrant parents who often are left off the parent-involvement bandwagon.

The school waits until the spring to bring in community-service agencies to talk about immigration law and citizenship. By then, Burrows says, staff members have had a better chance of gaining parents’ trust on what can be a highly charged issue. Parents who’ve come to the United States legally may be wary of asking immigration-related questions for fear of jeopardizing their legal status. For those here illegally, the word immigration is often synonymous with deportation.

To make learning English easier, the school offers parents a free ESL class once a week. At 8:30 Wednesday morning, half a dozen parents squeeze into metal and wooden desks to hear from Burke and volunteer Vita Rosenberg, a retired teacher who started her teaching career in this building in the 1940s when many of the students were recent Greek and Italian immigrants. The image of the parents tucked into too-small desks is telling. Role reversal--where child becomes parent and parent becomes child--is common among immigrant families. The teens often learn English more quickly than their parents, sometimes using their newfound clout to manipulate situations, as Burke explains.

She hands out copies of a prototype report card from Newcomers High to show parents how to read it and then notes the upcoming school holidays. “Sometimes, our children don’t tell us the whole story, as you well know,” she says, as a few of the parents nod knowingly. “Students love November because we have three holidays. Now you know, in case your children all of a sudden tell you it’s five.”

The cafeteria at Newcomers High, as in most schools, is deafeningly loud. Students group themselves by language for the most part: Chinese in one corner, Spanish in another, Bengali across the room. The so-called pocket languages, which only a handful of students share, are scattered throughout.

But cultural exchanges do take place.

Maciek Wojewoda trades his tape by Polish rock group Maanam for one by Seotaiji & Boys from a Korean classmate sitting next to him munching pizza.

Natalia Cela from Ecuador comforts her friend Angela Gouede from the Ivory Coast, who’s lost her subway pass. Natalia says she’s starting to learn Bengali from friends at Newcomers High.

Moin Hassan from Bangladesh, Artem Zoubtsov from the Ural region of Russia, and Ngawang Phuntsok from Tibet hang out at school, but they don’t feel comfortable enough with English to talk on the phone at home. So they fax each other instead from their parents’ businesses.

Dating can pose challenges, too. Physical education teacher Diana Cabot recalls a particular couple, one of whom spoke Russian, the other Spanish. Both were in a beginners-level ESL class. Cabot says when she asked how they communicated, they simply shrugged their shoulders and smiled.

Not all the intercultural connections have gone smoothly here, though most teachers say they are amazed by the relative lack of conflict among students of startlingly distinct languages, cultures, and religions. Tensions have surfaced at times among some Bengali and Pakistani students, whose countries split after a bitter civil war that left an independent state of Bangladesh in 1972. And some coaching has been needed when Spanish-speaking students unwittingly insult their South Asian classmates by grouping them together as “Hindus,” when in fact many are Muslim.

“When I came to this school, I thought, my God, with all these ethnicities, it’s going to be international conflict all over the place,” Sheehan says.

He also assumed that many of his students would be politically attuned, like the Romanian girl in his class who had grown up in the era of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But he was wrong. “She’s not that interested,” he says with a chuckle. “She’s a teenager. She wants roller blades and a boyfriend.”

At times, it is easy to forget that this school is different. Posters in the hall announce a senior ski trip and an upcoming school dance where the Macarena reigns supreme. Cell models fill a glass case near the science rooms, albeit labeled with such terms as “endoplasmic reticulum” in Chinese.

On a gray morning, 15 students start a two-hour trek from Long Island City to their sister school in Sag Harbor, a tourist community whose population swells in the summer with visitors flocking to the Hamptons beaches. A group from Sag Harbor’s Pierson High visited Newcomers High in September.

The exchange is a chance for students from Newcomers High to practice their English and meet real “American” teens. But it’s also a chance for the rather homogeneous Pierson students to mix with an international crowd.

Su Jin Chen, 15, settles into a vinyl seat by the window on the Long Island Railroad train and, as his teacher suggested, observes the changes in scenery from town to town. Once in awhile, he jots down a few notes. The urban landscape fades into brown rustling grasses that partly obscure the grand, weathered gray shingle homes typical of the area.

When Su Jin and his classmates get to Pierson, their Sag Harbor counterparts will ask them about their favorite foods, their brothers and sisters, the professional sports teams in their home countries, and popular CDs. Some of the girls will entertain questions about when they were allowed to start wearing makeup or whether they have shopping malls near their homes in their countries.

But at this moment, as the houses pass in a blur, Su Jin speaks of home. He now lives with his mother in the basement of his uncle’s house. His mother works in a garment factory. His father has returned to China, where Su Jin’s younger brother has remained. Su Jin plays basketball after school from time to time with a couple of Taiwanese friends. Or watches TV. But much of the time, his thoughts are elsewhere.

“The only thing I miss in China is my friends,” Su Jin says. “I make friends here, but not the same relationship as in China. We did everything together: study, play, and live. Mom says maybe we will go back to visit in 1998.”

He bites his lip gently and stares out the train window. “For now, we are so far away. Just so far ...” he trails off as the train starts to slow.