Awilda Rodriguez and Enid Rosario-Ramos assess the needs of displaced Puerto Rican students in the wake of hurricanes Irma and Maria

“Tell your neighbors, tell your friends—these children are welcome with open arms,” said OCPS Superintendent Barbara Jenkins. The governor of Florida, Rick Scott, worked to remove bureaucratic hurdles for students to enroll, and for Puerto Rican teachers to apply to work, in OCPS. In fact, OCPS stationed its own human resources officers at the Orlando Airport to greet arriving families. They enrolled students in schools and offered interviews to parents and family members for personnel positions, including teaching jobs as well as bookkeeping and custodial positions.

An estimated 3,500 Puerto Ricans entered the district during that period, and the stories of their hardship and courage are numerous. Many of them left loved ones behind; some arrived as unaccompanied minors, planning to stay with family. Just being in a classroom again was difficult for some students, since many schools across Puerto Rico had been closed since the hurricanes.

Eager to assist the recently arrived students, Awilda Rodriguez, Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, and Enid Rosario-Ramos, Professor in Educational Studies, conducted research to gain a better understanding of the educational transitions and disruptions the students faced. In partnership with OCPS, they looked to assess the district’s response to the influx of hurricane-displaced students and their families.

“We wanted to understand the transitions of the Puerto Rican students who were coming from a different education system,” says Rodriguez. “This was a phenomenon that was playing out in the media and we wanted to understand and give a context to this issue.” Rosario-Ramos adds that they had already been engaging with OCPS due to their interest in the influx of Puerto Ricans to Florida who had entered the state because of financial challenges in Puerto Rico.

“Then the hurricane came,” says Rosario-Ramos, “and we realized that the district’s needs could have shifted. So we asked them how we could best serve them in this new context, since it was an influx of more people, in a shorter period of time, and with different needs.”

The pair composed the following research questions, traveling to Florida several times in 2018 to conduct interviews and collect data:

1. How did recently arrived Puerto Rican students and their families perceive their educational opportunities and navigate educational systems in OCPS? What supports did they rely on to make their transitions?
2. What policies and strategies did the district employ to receive and support newly arrived Puerto Rican students? What, if any, challenges did district personnel perceive in responding to the influx?
3. How did school personnel (e.g. teachers, counselors, school administrators) respond to the influx of Puerto Rican students resulting from the hurricane crisis? What, if any, challenges did school personnel perceive in responding to the influx?

Partnering with five OCPS high schools, the pair interviewed 90 people who were district employees, administrators, teachers, students, family members, and community leaders. They collected school documents as well. Their findings centered around three main themes that shaped the families’ transitions and the district’s response to the newly arrived Puerto Ricans:  addressing incomers’ basic needs, providing academic support to displaced students, and navigating graduation and postsecondary transition requirements.

Basic needs—including housing, employment, relationship supports, and emotional needs—were the most urgent concerns that needed to be addressed for the hurricane survivors. The school system recognized this and offered food and clothing, school supplies, social workers, employment support, and additional aid. “Organizations and individuals also mobilized their resources to help these people, who left behind everything, to establish some normalcy,” says Rodriguez. “There were kids who even came on their own to stay with families on the mainland, and so the community opened its doors to them, literally, in order to help the kids continue their education. At the same time, the families in Puerto Rico didn’t know when the schools were going to reopen or be repaired from the damage.”

“This is generally part of the district’s narrative,” says Rosario-Ramos. “With the actions they took, there were some successes, and some missed opportunities, but they remained focused to ensure that the students and families’ basic needs were met.”

One unanticipated necessity the researchers uncovered was the mental health needs of the students and families who had recently arrived. In particular, there were not enough Spanish-speaking mental health professionals to provide support to the large group of incoming families. Despite this challenge, district personnel steadfastly focused on their primary goal, which was to provide a welcoming environment. But there was a downside: the additional work of helping students establish a sense of belonging led to a heavy burden on the Spanish-speaking school employees.

When it came to counseling and mental health services, both professors explain that the district was challenged by the new demands of the community. Says Rosario-Ramos, “Teachers, clerks, social workers, Spanish speakers, and district leaders all felt unequipped to handle the trauma that students felt from dealing with the destruction of the hurricane and being separated from their families. The district leaders felt that, in hindsight, this was a missed opportunity. Still,” she added, “OCPS was good at predicting how many people would come and how it could affect their needs for services like busing and food.”

“You have people needing a lot of things,” explains Rodriguez, “but they also deal with food insecurities and the trauma that they had in Puerto Rico. Some had survivor’s guilt. Moving to Florida did not just remove these things. There was a lot weighing on these students.”

The second theme the researchers uncovered involved providing academic supports like academic counseling, language support, and technology assistance. Though administrators minimized “red tape” across the district, families reported receiving inconsistent support when it came to the willingness of personnel to help them with their transitional needs. Personnel, in turn, felt challenged supporting students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, perceiving the school systems in Puerto Rico as variant in the quality of instruction in the disciplines as well as in English language.

Graduation requirements also differed between Puerto Rico’s and Florida’s educational systems. This led to general uncertainty for families and school staff. The third theme identified by Rodriguez and Rosario-Ramos was navigating graduation requirements and postsecondary transitions. OCPS had described the newly arrived students as hardworking and dedicated across the board,  but even with that dedication, juniors and seniors faced the biggest challenges since the uncertain location of their families made it hard for them to prepare for postsecondary education. Graduation requirements varied between the two locales in terms of credit hour and testing requirements. Furthermore, a lack of clear communication about the option to obtain a diploma from Puerto Rico instead of from Florida posed yet another challenge to graduating students.

“For me, it was also surprising to learn about the state policy context,” says Rodriguez. With these families moving into an “English-only” state, it presented a number of challenges. Students who needed to satisfy state requirements, for example, could only be tested in English. This led to them facing a number of issues, especially if they were seniors who were not English-dominant speakers. They had already faced trauma in the hurricane and its aftermath, then they moved to a new place, and now they were facing tests as well.”

The academic performance of the Puerto Rican students was shaped by a need to fuse together their old and new lives  while seeking to have their basic needs met. Rosario-Ramos and Rodriguez credit the OCPS for successfully garnering the resources needed to help students acclimate to their new schools and to encourage the integration of their families into the community. The district accomplished this by reducing barriers to school enrollment and by using an “open arms” policy while assisting with their basic and emergent needs. Rosario-Ramos commends the district’s history of welcoming students: “They had the ability to know what works well, and they were also open to ideas and policies that would help them communicate that legacy.”

Both professors note that the frequency of natural disasters—and thus the numbers of environmental refugees—is increasing. For this reason, school districts are now in a good place to examine best practices for integrating displaced students and families so that their academic and social growth will prosper. Their project, they hope, will allow districts like OCPS to develop these best practices.

As for next steps, Rodriguez says they will go beyond the “deep dive” they took into the five OCPS schools. “Now we want to do a wider take and a survey to understand the broader lens on the experience of Puerto Rican students across the district. We’ll take a more quantitative approach on understanding, particularly, students returning to the island. When power was restored and schools opened, many students went back.” Using this mixed-methods approach, the researchers explain, allows them to provide data and analyses that respond to the situation using a lens that is both deep and wide.