Moving to a new country can be difficult for anyone, but for students who have just arrived in this country as refugees, or from traumatic situations in their home country, transitioning to school can be exceptionally hard.
Mountain View Middle School is the site for Beaverton School District's middle level Newcomer Center. Here we help the most vulnerable students new to the country adjust to school in the United States, and to support them academically, mentally and emotionally.
Our Newcomer Center is a school within the school that provides acculturation supports to students who have entered the country within the last year, have had an interruption in education, have suffered some type of trauma or suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Mountain View's Newcomer Program is staffed with one teacher and two instructional assistants, and a part-time social worker. At this site, we can support up to 15 students at a time. The majority of the program is self-contained, students engage in instructional activities that work to enhance and accelerate the acquisition of the English language so they are able to navigate the classrooms and communities of which they are a part. At the middle school level, students also participate in electives classes and are provided additional support in the core content classes.
The staff in the Newcomer Center is provided training in trauma-informed teaching to reduce the initial distress of the students and to help them eventually return to their home school.
The Newcomer Center is only a temporary placement, and students are transitioned back to their home school within about a year. Additionally, students and their families are given support for basic needs. Every student who comes to the Newcomer Center is provided with home visits from our social worker to connect the family with resources in the community.
