This story is part of a series about how schools, teachers and students are coping with the immigration crisis.
PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — Wilda Rosario’s support groups for immigrant students at Patchogue-Medford High School usually start out with lots of laughter. That’s just how teenagers are, she says. But it doesn’t take too long for conversations to turn serious with this group of kids, most of them children seeking asylum from violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
During an ice-breaker of light-hearted questions, the teens turn from a discussion of their favorite foods to the meals their grandmothers made back home, and how much they miss them. What they’d bring to a deserted island morphs into a conversation about what it would have been like to take an airplane to America, instead of having to hike through the desert.
From there, during each weekly meeting in a conference room a few doors down from the principal’s office in this sprawling high school of nearly 2,500 kids, the students dig deeper and deeper into the traumas that haunt them — nightmares about sinking into muddy rivers, or being lost in the pitch-black of the desert night. They talk, too, of the hopes that keep them going — getting into college, building a house for their parents back home.
[For more on this story by SARAH GARLAND, go to https://hechingerreport.org/after-a-hate-crime-a-town-welcomes-immigrants-into-its-schools/?]
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