On a recent day this month, about 60 students gathered in Alameda High School’s Historic Classroom.  

At one table, a native English speaker tutored a 9th grade student from Colombia on his math assignment.   
At another, a Russian student translated for an English-speaking student who was helping another Russian student with her homework. 

At a third table, several students who speak Farsi talked quietly among themselves as they waited for younger students to arrive. 
And at still another, one student spoke Portuguese to a student who recently moved here from Brazil.   

The students were part of a new “ELD Task Force” developed by Sunny Xu, an AHS senior. Sunny – who speaks

Cantonese,Mandarin, and English – recognized that students who are recent immigrants often struggled in school because they were not yet fluent in English. In response, she developed an innovative tutoring program that lets EL students get the help they need in the language they speak. As it turns out, the students are getting many more benefits, as well.

“This young woman is incredibly intelligent and visionary,” says Amy Symons Burke, an instructional coach at AHS. “She saw a need and she filled it with remarkable insight and determination. She’s just amazing.” 

“A Safe Study Place” 
Alameda High hosts AUSD’s only high school program for “newcomer” students -- those who have just moved here from another country--and has more English Learners (ELs) than any other AUSD high school*. Those students receive support via an English Language Development (ELD) program. Still, like EL students across the country, many of them struggle with understanding their schoolwork, participating in class, chronic absenteeism, and motivation.

In Xu’s program, students who would like help with their schoolwork go to the school’s Historic Classroom during their SMART periods and sit at tables designated for a language, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Cantonese, Vietnamese, or Farsi.   
Also in the room are students who can tutor an EL in their native language or provide translation services for an English-speaking tutor. The EL students seeking tutoring get matched with tutors and translators who speak their language, and the teams then focus on the EL student’s school work. 

“My goal was to provide a safe study place where people could get language support and also homework help,” she says. 

ELPAC Support 

In the course of establishing the task force, Sunny identified another need, as well. “Students in high school generally don’t take standardized testing very seriously,” she says. “But for English Learners, the annual English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC) is actually very important, because that’s what allows them to get out of the ELD program. So if they don’t pass by even a couple of points, they stay in ELD for another year.” 

After talking to ELD teachers, Sunny set up an ELPAC Test Prep Program. In addition to raising awareness of the importance of the test, she reviewed ELPAC data for Alameda High and identified the areas in which they needed the most support. Then she trained other students how to do ELPAC tutoring and set up study sessions specifically focused on those areas. 

Once the study period was over, Sunny organized a celebration that included donated food, a scavenger hunt, and a map that showed from where all of the students came. 

“The Humanity Piece” 
That kind of social connection is a key part of the program’s success. When the program first started, Sunny, says, “the students seemed kind of shy and were very much focused on studying. After several months, however, “the students began to develop bonds with each other.  During our sessions, they started having fun conversations with each other and more comfortable just hanging out.” 

“The humanity piece here is not insignificant,” Symons Burke says. “What she has created is so much larger than just a peer tutoring program. She’s helping students who can feel marginalized, invisible, and disempowered make connections and feel supported. She is providing newcomers with opportunities both to meet kids with shared language and cultural norms and see who they can become as their identity shifts from refugee, to newcomer to more mainstream, American high school student.” 

When asked why they got involved in the program, one girl said her father had talked to her about how difficult it was for him when he first arrived in the US as a student. “He said it was really hard to integrate without being able to speak the language. I wanted to help people find their place in school and succeed academically.” 

Another student, herself a newcomer, had already been helping to translate for students when she heard about the program. She, too, wanted to help other students. “Some of them are becoming my closest and best friends,” she said.  

After she graduates, Sunny is hoping to go to Princeton (she’s currently on the waitlist).  She’d also like to see her tutoring program stabilized at AHS and replicated AUSD’s middle schools and other high schools. “I think it’s important for EL students across the district to be able to access this kind of support,” she says. “I think the model works.”