Missionaries Teach Refugee Students English, More at Spring Forest Middle

By Jaimy Jones / Houston Chronicle Memorial Examiner, jjones@chron.com
Published 12:03 pm, Monday, December 12, 2016

Spring Forest Middle School is the school to numerous refugee children and thus a program has been implemented to help those students adjust to the education system. Submitted photo

When Trina Morford was confronted with her third-grade daughter's language arts homework about three years ago, she felt helpless - half of the lessons were in Spanish because she was in a dual-language program. Faced for the first time with being unable to help her child, and knowing her daughter was on her own, she panicked.

But her daughter, now 13 and a student at Spring Forest Middle School, lives in the U.S. where her first language of English is the common tongue, and she was easily able to find support for her studies.

That panicked and helpless feeling was the motivation behind her bringing the "Daily Dose" project to Spring Forest, where she is a parent volunteer, and to Principal Kaye Williams when it became clear that the school was in need of ESL services because of the sudden enrollment of 30 to 40 refugee children last year at the SBISD campus.

Williams says her campus has the highest number of refugee children - 42 right now - in all of SBISD.

They all come from war-torn countries, said Williams, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and several African nations, and many of them were born and raised in refugee camps.

According to Houston Chronicle reports, in 2016 Texas received the fourth-most Syrian refugees in the nation, about 400, with roughly a third coming to Houston.

Williams, knowing her staff wasn't prepared to handle the unique needs of these children, was open to Morford's idea of bringing the church-based program into the school, with some modifications.

"I thought, 'What are we going to do?'," said Williams. "We have to educate these children, they're our children."

The Daily Dose program was previously only helping adult immigrants across SBISD learn conversational English to a mostly Hispanic population. It's staffed by missionaries based out of her church at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints near Dairy Ashford Road and Westpark Drive.

Although the lessons are taught by young Mormon missionaries who have a required number of service hours to complete by their church, Morford says the on-campus sessions are completely free of religious doctrine and offered solely as a benefit to the community.

The missionaries come from all over the world, said Morford, and offer their time at no cost.
Previously, the focus on conversational English was enough for parents from Mexico and Central America. But the program had stalled because the missionaries don't teach reading or writing.

"The challenge we're having in the school, is we have children coming from different parts of the world, middle-school aged, they speak Arabic and the alphabet is different...many children who came to Spring Forest were not even at a Pre-K level of learning of their own language," said Williams.

Morford adds that the traumatic situations they come from create even more obstacles than just reading and writing.

"The missionaries benefit our ESL students because they not only teach them English," said teacher's aide Khadi Goodside.

"But also teach life skills that help to acclimate them to the American lifestyle. They taught the students how to shop at the grocery store, and how to use the American dollars...They also teach them practical uses of household items they did not have back in their original countries," said Goodside.

The program provides two certified teachers and a teacher's aid to supervise the missionaries in the library where the lessons are taught twice a week to all 42 students, an hour and half each time.

"When the missioners come, they (the students) don't want them to leave. Their faces light up," said Williams.

Because of the success with the program, last week Spring Branch Education Foundation awarded Spring Forest a $3,600 grant to expand the program on campus to provide Chromebooks and iPads for the students.

Williams said that SBISD is very supportive of the program, and that her school has had visits from four different districts in the area who want to see how it works now that they're seeing refugee populations at their campuses too.

Next week, Spring Forest Middle will host a "Newcomer Breakfast" uniquely for refugee families to help orient them to an unfamiliar aspect of life: American schools.

"It's been trial by fire and trial and error, they're needs are just so great," said Williams.