Many immigrants from Honduras, Ecuador, and elsewhere in Central America came to New Orleans to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Today, the children of those immigrants are still struggling to enter an unfamiliar school system reborn in the wake of that tragedy.
“Schools were having a very hard time working with them and adapting to the needs of a new student and family population,” said Mary Moran, a longtime advocate for parents in education. There is a language barrier. But, more than that, there is a lack of trust: some parents have been reluctant to enroll their children in school because of documentation issues.
Last year, Moran and a fellow community organizer, Henry Jones, started Nuestra Voz (Our Voice) to empower immigrant parents within the school system. The two were working as advocates in Baton Rouge when they started hearing about the influx of unaccompanied minors into Louisiana, particularly New Orleans, and they decided they had to get involved.
“There was a clear need that no one had the capacity to meet,” she said. “We just really believed in what we were doing and the parents that we were meeting.”
Moran and Jones say some 2,500 unaccompanied minors have come into New Orleans in the past three years. Because New Orleans’ school system is decentralized, allowing for choice across the city, immigrant children are not clustered as they might be in another district.
“Here you have every school grappling with 20 or 50 or 60,” she said. “Few schools have a critical mass of Latino students they are dealing with, but all schools are seeing that population grow.”
Moran and Jones say Nuestra Voz has now worked with about 2,000 Latino families, expanding beyond just those with unaccompanied minors, through three distinct campaigns:
- 4WARD — A campaign intended to survey more than 300 Spanish-speaking families and identify where voters are concentrated to possibly start building voting blocs. Moran says not all are undocumented and many are interested in building political power.
- OneApp Ambassadors — Training immigrant parents to educate one another about the school enrollment system and how to find the best schools and services, based on report cards and parent experiences.
- Parent Champion Circles — A training program for parents to learn how to navigate the school system, from reading state assessment results to learning about the common core to setting up meetings with the principal and teacher, even if they don’t speak the same language.
“There’s a lot of fear and there’s a lot of hostility,” Moran said. “So building trust and asking people to become interested in anything other than immigration — to be interested in education as an issue and to become advocates — is a huge leap.”
Moran and Jones say that in less than a year, Nuestra Voz has quickly grown through recruitment in the schools, churches and Latino community. “The parents using word of mouth are starting to recruit other parents,” Jones said. Nuestra Voz members show up at school meeting in the group’s signature green t-shirts.
“Beyond the next three years, what are we looking at is: How do we get our children to be college track? How do we get them to be more than four Senate seats are Latino? How do we get them to power beyond?” Moran said. “They are very interested in those conversations.”
Moran said Latinos need a bigger advocacy role in education nationwide, with such growing numbers of students across the country. “Our long-term goal is to really grow a national organization. But it’s very key that what happens here in New Orleans is representative of what is happening in other cities,” she said. “Not only are we are at the table, but our parents have a voice.”
