Refugee students in the Fort Worth Independent School District will soon have access to on-campus counseling services to help them navigate the challenges they face when attending school in a new country.
The district’s school board approved a memorandum of understanding that allowed Catholic Charities Fort Worth to place certified counselors on campuses to work with students whose families had been resettled in the area.
The change, which will take effect at the start of the upcoming school year, builds on a longstanding partnership between Fort Worth ISD and Catholic Charities.
Catholic Charities has provided a range of services to refugee students for years, including tutoring and crisis intervention. The organization also provides support and professional development to teachers to help them understand how to best support refugee students. These services are funded through the Refugee School Impact Program, a grant program administered by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, and are at no cost to the district.
Catholic Charities already offers counseling services for refugee students in Fort Worth ISD. But in recent years, school leaders have had to send students off campus to receive these services, said Cesar Padilla, a district spokesman. When students had to leave school for a counseling appointment, they often missed half to a full day of school, he said. Bringing these services to campus will allow these students to access counseling with less disruption to the rest of their school day, he said.
Alyse Chung, spokesperson for Catholic Charities Fort Worth, said counseling services are an important part of the support the organization provides to refugee students. These students often carry physical and emotional trauma and have difficulty adjusting to life in the United States, she said.
According to a report from the Texas Education Agency, the number of immigrant students in Texas schools has grown rapidly over the past decade, increasing by about 74% between the 2012-2013 school year and the 2022-2023 school year.
In an interview last month, Marie Mendoza, executive director of Fort Worth ISD’s emerging bilingual department, said newcomers — English learners who have recently immigrated to the United States — make up a small but growing portion of the district’s emerging bilingual population. She said about 2,000 newcomers were enrolled in the district last school year.
Not all of these newcomers are refugees, but many still face enormous challenges when entering the U.S. education system, Mendoza said. Many had their education interrupted by conditions in their home countries, she said. Some may never have attended school before coming to the United States. Others went to school in refugee camps, where education often looked very different from the standards in their home countries or in the United States.
