In School for the First Time, Teenage Immigrants Struggle

Many immigrant children have never been to school, don't know how to read their own language and are now trying to learn English. This is especially hard for older teenagers, who are put into high school and don't know how to learn or study. DP

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Fanta Konneh is the first girl in her family to go to school. Not the first to go to college, or to graduate from high school. Fanta, 18, who grew up in Guinea after her family fled Liberia, became the first to walk into a classroom of any kind last year.

“Just the boys go to school, so I always knew I was left out,” said Fanta, a student at Ellis Preparatory Academy in the South Bronx. “But here, I am trying. I can say many things I did not know before. I can learn things more.”

New York City classrooms have long been filled with children from all over the world, and the education challenges they bring with them. But hidden among the nearly 150,000 students across the city still struggling to learn English are an estimated 15,100 who, like Fanta, have had little or no formal schooling and are often illiterate in their native languages.

More than half of these arrive as older teenagers and land in the city’s high schools, where they must learn how to learn even as their peers prepare for state subject exams required for a diploma.

“They don’t always have a notion of what it means to be a student,” said Stephanie Grasso, an English teacher at Ellis Prep, which opened this fall and is New York’s first school devoted to this hard-to-educate population. “Certain ideas are completely foreign to them. They have to learn how to ask questions and understand things for themselves.”
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