Filling the Void After High School

Educators often don't know what students' residency situation is "until they end up in your office crying," said Kevin Terry, a guidance director at Dominion High.

Among those facing barriers are some of the highest achievers. A recent graduate from Osbourne Park High School in Manassas finished her senior year among the top students in her class and received a prestigious award from the faculty.

Her college applications would have shown that she was a member of the National Honor Society, the French Honor Society and student government, but she delayed her college plans because she lacks a current visa.

Teachers at the school are trying to help the 18-year-old Salvadoran get into college by contacting people at local universities and researching scholarships. "We have even investigated getting her name attached to some sort of bill in Congress," said Anita Al-Haj, director of the English for Speakers of Other Languages program. "We are trying everything in our power to help her."

ESOL teachers in Prince William County are developing a standard curriculum for their 13,000 students to explain clearly the path to graduation and the options afterward for documented and undocumented students. They plan to include a unit on immigration law.

Such systemwide programs targeting undocumented students are unusual, however. Most efforts come from individual teachers or counselors hard-wired to help students succeed, as they encounter individual children in need.

At Annandale High School in Fairfax County, history teacher Eleanor Shumaker, now retired, became the legal guardian of a Somalian student in the late 1990s who came to the United States illegally and alone and had become homeless. More recently, a counselor at Yorktown High School in Arlington County, who declined to give her name, sheltered an immigrant student in a spare bedroom so she could graduate from high school.

Benitez came to the United States with a friend when he was 15, hoping to join his mother in Loudoun. After walking across the desert for a day and a night, he was picked up in a small truck packed with other border-crossers and driven to Phoenix. "They just lay you down like cigarettes, one after another one," he recalled. From there, he made his way to Northern Virginia.

He started ninth grade a few weeks later. He recalled long days trying to comprehend rapid-fire lessons and late nights working at Wendy's, where he earned money to send to younger siblings in Mexico and to help his mother pay medical bills. He applied for a resident visa early on as a relative of his stepfather, a U.S. citizen.

At Dominion High, in 10th grade, he joined the homework club and got to know Simms and Terry, along with Duke Butkovich, another liaison hired by the school system to work with parents or families to help students succeed. They reviewed his assignments slowly with him to help him understand.

They saw how hard he was working and tried to help him in other ways. They invited his mother and stepfather to visit the school, offered him free school supplies and encouraged him to enroll in the vocational program.

At first he was wary of their attention. When one of them would sit down at the lunch table next to him, Butkovich recalled, he would say, "Why do you always pick on the Hispanic table? Why don't you pick on the white people?"