Just three miles southwest of the famous New Orleans French Quarter, several dozen newly arrived students are learning math in Spanish.
Survivor’s hit song “Eye of the Tiger” plays loudly from speakers in a third-floor corner classroom of Walter L. Cohen High School while Mr. Zavala’s students race to write everything they know about slope, y-intercepts, and the formula of a line on a worksheet. This is how they begin each class—with silent scribbling, or a “brain dump,” each student laser-focused on the page. The Survivor song comes to an end, but the energy stays high throughout the hour, with chatty collaborators and notebooks filled with equations. Welcome to Las Sierras Academy, the first and only program for newcomer high school students in New Orleans.
Newcomers in the New Orleans Charter Context
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, schools shut down. With the city devastated, Louisiana leaders sought to improve decades of low performance and rebuild New Orleans education. To do so, the state made the controversial decision to take control of many New Orleans schools, removing local control from the city’s public school board. As a result, by 2019, New Orleans became the first all-charter school system in the country.
While still publicly funded, charter schools are independently run, and are given greater autonomy in exchange for accountability; if they don’t produce academic success or meet other criteria in their charter, they put themselves at risk of closure. Charters have more discretion in how they support the unique needs of specific groups of students. However, support for a growing demographic—newcomer students—has proven uniquely challenging for many schools.
About a decade after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the surrounding region became a hotbed for newcomer students. In 2015, Louisiana had one of the highest numbers of unaccompanied children released to sponsors in the South. While federal Title III funding provided schools with some support for newcomers, most campuses didn’t have a clear, coherent approach to meeting their diverse needs.
The Evolution of Las Sierras Academy
In 2021, Collegiate Academies, a charter school network of five high schools that now serves nearly 3,000 students, used its charter autonomy to open Las Sierras Academy, a one-year immersive program designed to help newcomers develop the English proficiency and content knowledge they need to succeed in a Collegiate Academies network home school.
In 2015, when Collegiate Academies hired Emma Merrill as an ESL coordinator for the network’s George Washington Carver High School, Merrill tried to provide her new ELs with individual support. Yet, while she was able to make a difference for some students, she quickly recognized that a far more robust process of integration was needed if newcomers were going to be adequately prepared for their classes. So, with approval from Collegiate Academies, she began shaping a program specifically for newcomers, so that the network could be sure of meeting their unique needs.
In 2019–20, Merrill conducted research for the program, testing new courses (like U.S. History and English I) designed specifically for newcomers. The following academic year, 2020–21, Carver hired an EL culture dean and a mental health specialist as part of the growing newcomer program pilot. By 2021–22, they were ready: Las Sierras Academy opened as a formalized strand program, housed within Carver High School, for twenty-five newcomer students. In the fall of 2023, the program was relocated to Walter L. Cohen, where they hosted seventy newcomer students, most from Spanish-speaking Central American countries, and particularly Honduras.
Las Sierras’ Academic Model
As New Orleans’ first newcomer program, Las Sierras Academy is now assiduously filling a gap long left for individual schools to fill as best they can. It is an opt-in program for newly-arrived students, which means that newcomer students who enroll at any of the four New Orleans-area Collegiate Academies high schools have the option to spend two intensive semesters at Las Sierras before returning to their school of origin for the remainder of their high school education. Staff at Collegiate Academies high schools frame the program to parents as an opportunity to significantly improve their English proficiency, gain academic credits, develop social and emotional skills, and learn how to navigate and successfully integrate into mainstream U.S. high schools. Indeed, Las Sierras staff believe they are cultivating an environment of high achievement in areas beyond English proficiency alone.
While New Orleans charter schools do not require teachers to be certified, Las Sierras has one of the strongest teacher training programs in the city to ensure their newcomer students receive the best quality education.
Merrill looks for candidates with what she calls a “founder’s mindset”—people who do what it takes to support their kids—and who hold themselves to the same standards of excellence, growth, and development to which they hold their students.
First, Merrill looks for candidates with what she calls a “founder’s mindset”—people who do what it takes to support their kids—and who hold themselves to the same standards of excellence, growth, and development to which they hold their students. Then, after an initial application review, the candidate is invited to teach a sample lesson to the entire Las Sierras team to assess how they respond to feedback and how they work in a team. Once selected, the new hire joins a semester-long intensive cohort for first-year teachers, including training every day after school, live coaching during the day, and morning and afternoon huddles. All staff are assessed at the mid-year point and at the end of the year to evaluate their growth and the growth of their students. As Merrill puts it, “At Las Sierras, we believe adult culture is kid culture.” As the program director, she believes that if teachers expect growth and diligence from their students, they must expect the same from themselves. It shows.
Las Sierras staff develop their own curricula, one that is both aligned with Louisiana state standards and that integrates language development across all content areas. Mr. Zavala, one of Las Sierras’ founding teachers, has been creating his own algebra curriculum since his second year of teaching. He says that many of his students have gaps in their education before arriving to Las Sierras, so when they arrive, they are assessed for prior knowledge and placed in algebra cohorts based on academic need.
“When I first meet them,” he said, “many will tell me, ‘I didn’t go to school at all during COVID,’ and I see [in their assessments] that their needs are more than just remedial algebra, but basic skills like adding and multiplying… so I develop the curriculum to make sure they can keep up with the rigor of algebra while making up for lost time.”
He also adjusts the curriculum to account for the cultural differences required to understand math in a U.S. academic context. For example, in many Latin American countries, commas are used the way decimals are used here. He makes sure to incorporate information about these differences in his lessons so that students are prepared for what they will see on end-of-year state exams and beyond.
Early in his teaching career, Mr. Zavala primarily taught to the state standards, and 80 percent of his students passed the test. These are by no means weak results, but Zavala knew these numbers could go up, and he felt more of his students were capable of demonstrating their grasp of the subject matter. He started to incorporate stronger note-taking skills building into his lessons. Now, his Algebra I and Algebra II students have a notebook for their class where they keep track of new equations, vocabulary, and best practices, and he checks them regularly—for graded credit.
Additionally, while other teachers mostly instruct in English, Mr. Zavala teaches his math classes completely in Spanish. This means that he has to translate all the state math materials to Spanish for his students, but he knows how important it is to make the materials accessible to students so that they can succeed. To graduate, Louisiana high school students have to pass either Algebra I or Geometry, English I or II, and Biology or U.S. History. Only the math state exams are offered in Spanish, so Mr. Zavala takes this opportunity to ensure his students can get as close to that goal as possible.
After incorporating all of these changes, 91 percent of Zavala’s students passed last year’s test, and 25 percent demonstrated “mastery.” This is, in no small part, due to Zavala’s commitment to flexibility in the curriculum, a focus on skills building, and his close attention to how (and in what language) he teaches his class.
A Holistic Approach: Language Development and Wraparound Support
To meet their students’ needs and to help them develop English language proficiency in their year at Las Sierras, staff place students in cohorts based on arrival. One semester of English Language Arts (ELA) is focused on basic language development, vocabulary, and age-appropriate guided reading and reading intervention. In the second semester at Las Sierras, students will learn content that is more aligned with ninth-grade ELA, so that they are prepared to return to their home schools.
In other core content classes, Las Sierras teachers employ translanguaging, a pedagogical approach to teaching in which educators support students’ ability to move fluidly between languages. Research has found that translanguaging encourages students—especially ELs and newcomers—to speak more often in class by using their home language and practicing new English vocabulary words to piece together a sentence that conveys their learning.
This was evident when TCF researchers visited this past spring. In art class, students practiced sounding out new words to describe the drawings they created, guided by posters that aided them in the pronunciation of long and short vowels. Students cheered each other on when classmates struggled to pronounce a word and proudly displayed their anime drawings in front of the class. Meanwhile, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Haitian flags hung high behind them.
Beyond academics, Las Sierras prioritizes wraparound services. The program’s culture dean teaches electives and supports staff on behavior and attendance issues. A school-based social worker meets with students and their families throughout their time at Las Sierras to connect them to legal and other resources, and follows up with them after their transition back to their home campuses. Trauma, behavior, and addiction groups support students with specific needs that are getting in the way of their success. Most importantly, the school continues to offer these services to students beyond their time at Las Sierras.
A student said of Las Sierras, “Acabo de llegar hace cuatro meses, y me levanto todas las mañanas con muchas ganas de aprender.” (Translation: “I arrived four months ago, and I wake up every morning excited to learn.”)
It was clear that students were comfortable learning in this environment. Indeed, a student said of Las Sierras, “Acabo de llegar hace cuatro meses, y me levanto todas las mañanas con muchas ganas de aprender.” (Translation: “I arrived four months ago, and I wake up every morning excited to learn.”)
Building this culture requires dedication, compassion, and resourcefulness. With the Las Sierras team, the school has this in abundance. And staff are not content to stop their work at the edge of their campus.
Applying Lessons from Las Sierras across All of Louisiana
As a newcomer program, Las Sierras is unique. Situated in the Deep South and within the charter context, educators and staff have carefully and thoughtfully curated a program to meet New Orleans’ newest students’ needs inside and outside the classroom as they transition to this new life in the United States. What makes Las Sierras particularly special is its leaders’ commitment to take what they have learned and push for greater access to quality education across the entire state.
Louisiana is one of just nine states that still require students to pass standardized exit exams in order to get their diploma—and the only one without an appeals process. Except for Algebra I and Geometry, the state’s exams—known as LEAP (Louisiana Educational Assessment Program)—are given in English, though ELs can request extended time and use a dictionary for translation. Still, in 2019, nearly 60 percent of Louisiana ELs failed to graduate on time, and in 2023, 57 percent scored below satisfactory across all LEAP-tested subjects.
Merrill believes that the test doesn’t adequately even the playing field for students who are still learning English, much less those who have just arrived from another country. So she gathered a coalition of educators, school leaders, community organizers, and parents, and together they developed a policy called EXCELL, or Expanded Criteria for English Learners in Louisiana. Rather than tie graduation for all students to state exams, the proposal provides additional opportunities for students who come to the United States in or after the sixth grade to demonstrate mastery of content. If a student fails to pass a LEAP test, the proposed criteria will allow them to graduate as long as they complete a portfolio project that demonstrates mastery (or above) of the same concepts tested on the exam. Eligible students would also need to pass their diploma courses, meet seat time requirements, and demonstrate English proficiency.
In 2023, after years of organizing, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and the Louisiana House Education Committee approved the policy. Unfortunately, in his first days of office, Governor Landry vetoed the decision, preventing the policy from taking effect. As a result of that sudden reversal, students at Las Sierras and all newcomers across the state must still sit for end-of-year exams.
As Las Sierras prepares for ninety new students to begin the next school year on August 5, the EXCELL community continues to put pressure on the new governor and BESE. They have gathered nearly 1,300 signatures on a petition to reinstate the EXCELL appeals process, and Merrill is far from done with her advocacy.
“We are in a political position right now where some [government officials] don’t want to hear from us,” she said. “We need all the support we can get. We want to share more about what it means to help kids get access to graduation.”
On the website, the coalition says that EXCELL will help schools “move from test preparation to life preparation.” Merrill hopes to see this reality—a reality they have created within the walls of Las Sierras—for all newcomers, in New Orleans and beyond.
Header image: Two Las Sierras Academy students learning from Mr. Zavala, the program’s mathematics teacher and one of the founding staff members. Photo credit: Las Sierras Academy.
Tags: inclusive education, newcomer students, newcomer, educational equity
In the Heart of New Orleans, Newcomer Students Are Welcomed with Open Arms
Just three miles southwest of the famous New Orleans French Quarter, several dozen newly arrived students are learning math in Spanish.
Survivor’s hit song “Eye of the Tiger” plays loudly from speakers in a third-floor corner classroom of Walter L. Cohen High School while Mr. Zavala’s students race to write everything they know about slope, y-intercepts, and the formula of a line on a worksheet. This is how they begin each class—with silent scribbling, or a “brain dump,” each student laser-focused on the page. The Survivor song comes to an end, but the energy stays high throughout the hour, with chatty collaborators and notebooks filled with equations. Welcome to Las Sierras Academy, the first and only program for newcomer high school students in New Orleans.
Newcomers in the New Orleans Charter Context
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, schools shut down. With the city devastated, Louisiana leaders sought to improve decades of low performance and rebuild New Orleans education. To do so, the state made the controversial decision to take control of many New Orleans schools, removing local control from the city’s public school board. As a result, by 2019, New Orleans became the first all-charter school system in the country.
While still publicly funded, charter schools are independently run, and are given greater autonomy in exchange for accountability; if they don’t produce academic success or meet other criteria in their charter, they put themselves at risk of closure. Charters have more discretion in how they support the unique needs of specific groups of students. However, support for a growing demographic—newcomer students—has proven uniquely challenging for many schools.
About a decade after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the surrounding region became a hotbed for newcomer students. In 2015, Louisiana had one of the highest numbers of unaccompanied children released to sponsors in the South. While federal Title III funding provided schools with some support for newcomers, most campuses didn’t have a clear, coherent approach to meeting their diverse needs.
The Evolution of Las Sierras Academy
In 2021, Collegiate Academies, a charter school network of five high schools that now serves nearly 3,000 students, used its charter autonomy to open Las Sierras Academy, a one-year immersive program designed to help newcomers develop the English proficiency and content knowledge they need to succeed in a Collegiate Academies network home school.
In 2015, when Collegiate Academies hired Emma Merrill as an ESL coordinator for the network’s George Washington Carver High School, Merrill tried to provide her new ELs with individual support. Yet, while she was able to make a difference for some students, she quickly recognized that a far more robust process of integration was needed if newcomers were going to be adequately prepared for their classes. So, with approval from Collegiate Academies, she began shaping a program specifically for newcomers, so that the network could be sure of meeting their unique needs.
In 2019–20, Merrill conducted research for the program, testing new courses (like U.S. History and English I) designed specifically for newcomers. The following academic year, 2020–21, Carver hired an EL culture dean and a mental health specialist as part of the growing newcomer program pilot. By 2021–22, they were ready: Las Sierras Academy opened as a formalized strand program, housed within Carver High School, for twenty-five newcomer students. In the fall of 2023, the program was relocated to Walter L. Cohen, where they hosted seventy newcomer students, most from Spanish-speaking Central American countries, and particularly Honduras.
Las Sierras’ Academic Model
As New Orleans’ first newcomer program, Las Sierras Academy is now assiduously filling a gap long left for individual schools to fill as best they can. It is an opt-in program for newly-arrived students, which means that newcomer students who enroll at any of the four New Orleans-area Collegiate Academies high schools have the option to spend two intensive semesters at Las Sierras before returning to their school of origin for the remainder of their high school education. Staff at Collegiate Academies high schools frame the program to parents as an opportunity to significantly improve their English proficiency, gain academic credits, develop social and emotional skills, and learn how to navigate and successfully integrate into mainstream U.S. high schools. Indeed, Las Sierras staff believe they are cultivating an environment of high achievement in areas beyond English proficiency alone.
While New Orleans charter schools do not require teachers to be certified, Las Sierras has one of the strongest teacher training programs in the city to ensure their newcomer students receive the best quality education.
First, Merrill looks for candidates with what she calls a “founder’s mindset”—people who do what it takes to support their kids—and who hold themselves to the same standards of excellence, growth, and development to which they hold their students. Then, after an initial application review, the candidate is invited to teach a sample lesson to the entire Las Sierras team to assess how they respond to feedback and how they work in a team. Once selected, the new hire joins a semester-long intensive cohort for first-year teachers, including training every day after school, live coaching during the day, and morning and afternoon huddles. All staff are assessed at the mid-year point and at the end of the year to evaluate their growth and the growth of their students. As Merrill puts it, “At Las Sierras, we believe adult culture is kid culture.” As the program director, she believes that if teachers expect growth and diligence from their students, they must expect the same from themselves. It shows.
Las Sierras staff develop their own curricula, one that is both aligned with Louisiana state standards and that integrates language development across all content areas. Mr. Zavala, one of Las Sierras’ founding teachers, has been creating his own algebra curriculum since his second year of teaching. He says that many of his students have gaps in their education before arriving to Las Sierras, so when they arrive, they are assessed for prior knowledge and placed in algebra cohorts based on academic need.
“When I first meet them,” he said, “many will tell me, ‘I didn’t go to school at all during COVID,’ and I see [in their assessments] that their needs are more than just remedial algebra, but basic skills like adding and multiplying… so I develop the curriculum to make sure they can keep up with the rigor of algebra while making up for lost time.”
He also adjusts the curriculum to account for the cultural differences required to understand math in a U.S. academic context. For example, in many Latin American countries, commas are used the way decimals are used here. He makes sure to incorporate information about these differences in his lessons so that students are prepared for what they will see on end-of-year state exams and beyond.
Early in his teaching career, Mr. Zavala primarily taught to the state standards, and 80 percent of his students passed the test. These are by no means weak results, but Zavala knew these numbers could go up, and he felt more of his students were capable of demonstrating their grasp of the subject matter. He started to incorporate stronger note-taking skills building into his lessons. Now, his Algebra I and Algebra II students have a notebook for their class where they keep track of new equations, vocabulary, and best practices, and he checks them regularly—for graded credit.
Additionally, while other teachers mostly instruct in English, Mr. Zavala teaches his math classes completely in Spanish. This means that he has to translate all the state math materials to Spanish for his students, but he knows how important it is to make the materials accessible to students so that they can succeed. To graduate, Louisiana high school students have to pass either Algebra I or Geometry, English I or II, and Biology or U.S. History. Only the math state exams are offered in Spanish, so Mr. Zavala takes this opportunity to ensure his students can get as close to that goal as possible.
After incorporating all of these changes, 91 percent of Zavala’s students passed last year’s test, and 25 percent demonstrated “mastery.” This is, in no small part, due to Zavala’s commitment to flexibility in the curriculum, a focus on skills building, and his close attention to how (and in what language) he teaches his class.
A Holistic Approach: Language Development and Wraparound Support
To meet their students’ needs and to help them develop English language proficiency in their year at Las Sierras, staff place students in cohorts based on arrival. One semester of English Language Arts (ELA) is focused on basic language development, vocabulary, and age-appropriate guided reading and reading intervention. In the second semester at Las Sierras, students will learn content that is more aligned with ninth-grade ELA, so that they are prepared to return to their home schools.
In other core content classes, Las Sierras teachers employ translanguaging, a pedagogical approach to teaching in which educators support students’ ability to move fluidly between languages. Research has found that translanguaging encourages students—especially ELs and newcomers—to speak more often in class by using their home language and practicing new English vocabulary words to piece together a sentence that conveys their learning.
This was evident when TCF researchers visited this past spring. In art class, students practiced sounding out new words to describe the drawings they created, guided by posters that aided them in the pronunciation of long and short vowels. Students cheered each other on when classmates struggled to pronounce a word and proudly displayed their anime drawings in front of the class. Meanwhile, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Haitian flags hung high behind them.
Beyond academics, Las Sierras prioritizes wraparound services. The program’s culture dean teaches electives and supports staff on behavior and attendance issues. A school-based social worker meets with students and their families throughout their time at Las Sierras to connect them to legal and other resources, and follows up with them after their transition back to their home campuses. Trauma, behavior, and addiction groups support students with specific needs that are getting in the way of their success. Most importantly, the school continues to offer these services to students beyond their time at Las Sierras.
It was clear that students were comfortable learning in this environment. Indeed, a student said of Las Sierras, “Acabo de llegar hace cuatro meses, y me levanto todas las mañanas con muchas ganas de aprender.” (Translation: “I arrived four months ago, and I wake up every morning excited to learn.”)
Building this culture requires dedication, compassion, and resourcefulness. With the Las Sierras team, the school has this in abundance. And staff are not content to stop their work at the edge of their campus.
Applying Lessons from Las Sierras across All of Louisiana
As a newcomer program, Las Sierras is unique. Situated in the Deep South and within the charter context, educators and staff have carefully and thoughtfully curated a program to meet New Orleans’ newest students’ needs inside and outside the classroom as they transition to this new life in the United States. What makes Las Sierras particularly special is its leaders’ commitment to take what they have learned and push for greater access to quality education across the entire state.
Louisiana is one of just nine states that still require students to pass standardized exit exams in order to get their diploma—and the only one without an appeals process. Except for Algebra I and Geometry, the state’s exams—known as LEAP (Louisiana Educational Assessment Program)—are given in English, though ELs can request extended time and use a dictionary for translation. Still, in 2019, nearly 60 percent of Louisiana ELs failed to graduate on time, and in 2023, 57 percent scored below satisfactory across all LEAP-tested subjects.
Merrill believes that the test doesn’t adequately even the playing field for students who are still learning English, much less those who have just arrived from another country. So she gathered a coalition of educators, school leaders, community organizers, and parents, and together they developed a policy called EXCELL, or Expanded Criteria for English Learners in Louisiana. Rather than tie graduation for all students to state exams, the proposal provides additional opportunities for students who come to the United States in or after the sixth grade to demonstrate mastery of content. If a student fails to pass a LEAP test, the proposed criteria will allow them to graduate as long as they complete a portfolio project that demonstrates mastery (or above) of the same concepts tested on the exam. Eligible students would also need to pass their diploma courses, meet seat time requirements, and demonstrate English proficiency.
In 2023, after years of organizing, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and the Louisiana House Education Committee approved the policy. Unfortunately, in his first days of office, Governor Landry vetoed the decision, preventing the policy from taking effect. As a result of that sudden reversal, students at Las Sierras and all newcomers across the state must still sit for end-of-year exams.
As Las Sierras prepares for ninety new students to begin the next school year on August 5, the EXCELL community continues to put pressure on the new governor and BESE. They have gathered nearly 1,300 signatures on a petition to reinstate the EXCELL appeals process, and Merrill is far from done with her advocacy.
“We are in a political position right now where some [government officials] don’t want to hear from us,” she said. “We need all the support we can get. We want to share more about what it means to help kids get access to graduation.”
On the website, the coalition says that EXCELL will help schools “move from test preparation to life preparation.” Merrill hopes to see this reality—a reality they have created within the walls of Las Sierras—for all newcomers, in New Orleans and beyond.
Header image: Two Las Sierras Academy students learning from Mr. Zavala, the program’s mathematics teacher and one of the founding staff members. Photo credit: Las Sierras Academy.
Tags: inclusive education, newcomer students, newcomer, educational equity