At the start of class at Abraham Lincoln Middle School in Selma, California, Efraín Tovar stands at the open door of his homeroom and greets his students with a warm smile, just as he would his flock on Sundays at Redeemer’s Church, where he preaches in Spanish. The 12-, 13-, and 14-year-olds respond “Good morning” in English accented by Spanish and Zapotec and Punjabi. They settle into their seats, sitting under flags from Mexico, Guatemala, Pakistan, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines, Bolivia—one for every home country of the nearly 2,000 immigrants Tovar has taught since 1995. His classroom for newcomers—students who have immigrated to the United States within the past three years—provides a safe space for kids who are constantly striving to adjust to a new language, a new school, and a new country. Here, they can let their guard down within a supportive community. “This is a class where you can be with family, you can be with friends, you can be with people on the same journey,” Tovar says. “You can just be who you are as long as you learn.”
Tovar teaches in the Central Valley, also known as America’s fruit basket. The need for transient farm labor has drawn migrant workers to the area for over a century. Bound by mountains on all sides—the Cascades to the north, the Sierra Nevada to the east, the Tehachapis to the south, and the Coast Ranges to the west—the verdant valley produces a quarter of the United States’ food. Ninety percent of the country’s raisins are grown in vineyards around Selma, a sleepy city of 25,000. When visitors drive into town on Highway 99, they’re greeted by a billboard bearing Selma’s slogan: “The raisin capital of the world.”
Each year, an estimated 50,000-plus children immigrate to California. Many are fleeing conflict, persecution, and effects of climate change that have created unlivable situations in their homelands. Despite their vastly different circumstances, almost all immigrant children share one experience: public school. Without much federal support, teaching standards and strategies for immigrant students have largely been left to districts, schools, and individual educators like Tovar. These educators go beyond the conventional demands of the classroom: It’s not unusual for teachers to help their pupils access medical care or hunt down academic transcripts, navigating the bureaucracy of foreign consulates. Over his 28 years of teaching, Tovar has learned to communicate in Zapotec, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, and Vietnamese. He has helped find housing for students and their families, some of whom would otherwise be living in tents or at friends’ houses. His classroom is stocked with healthy snacks for food-insecure kids. “Providing a granola bar isn’t a lot, but it makes those students feel, ‘I can ask for help,’” says Tovar.
On a blisteringly hot morning in May, amid fields of plum trees and grapevines, Tovar welcomed 30 teachers, counselors, and administrators from across the state to his classroom for the first-ever California newcomer summit. The teachers spoke candidly about the work of supporting their classes through constant challenges. An educator talked about finding that with Russian families, reaching out over WhatsApp was more effective than phone calls. Another offered that while Google Translate doesn’t offer Mayan as a language, Microsoft Translator does. One teacher spoke about trying to help children traumatized by bombings in Ukraine understand the concept of a lockdown drill. Someone asked for resources to reach students from the Marshall Islands who spoke only Marshallese. Tovar often jumped in to amplify a question or offer advice. By midafternoon, he had lost his voice entirely and was resorting to vigorous thumbs-ups.
In 2021, Tovar created the online group California Newcomer Network to find and support other educators during the pandemic. It was a challenging time for all teachers but especially those with immigrant students. The group “became essential during lockdown, as we figured out how to do English-language development while distance learning,” he says. They started by sharing lesson plans and tactics for getting through to parents. Then they moved to statewide advocacy, pushing for more resources, training, and funding specifically for newcomer students. A critical step was drafting a formal definition of the term newcomer student, which, if recognized by state officials, would secure support for the growing population. Once a bill was written, Tovar spoke before the state senate’s Education Committee, offering testimony on behalf of his students. In October 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 714, which legally defined newcomers for the first time and offered guidance to educators.
Today, the network includes around 1,000 educators, administrators, and education advocates across the country. Tovar sees his organizing as a response to one of the largest challenges for teachers: isolation. “I felt alone, that no one really knew the complexity of knowing how to address the needs of our newcomers,” he says. “I know now that other educators throughout the state have felt the same way.”
Back with his students, Tovar starts the hour-long period with a seemingly straightforward lesson: names and introductions. Each child pulls out their mini-whiteboard as Tovar leads the class through some simple phrases: “Hello. My name is ___. I am ___ years old.” Tovar is so soft-spoken that he needs a clip-on microphone to be heard clearly across the room. He walks between the tables, correcting his students’ work and answering questions: how to spell “thirteen,” when to use upper- and lowercase letters, where in a sentence to place the period. Some kids ask their peers with more developed English skills for help.
Tovar’s pupils have a broad range of academic experiences. Some of the newcomers in his class qualify as SLIFE, or students with limited or interrupted formal education, many of whom don’t know how to read or write in their native language. But all of his students are studying English—and the conventions of American life. In his classroom, they learn school etiquette, which inevitably requires some unlearning. Tovar stresses the value of looking teachers in the eye, a sign of disrespect in some immigrants’ home countries, and gives tips on navigating the school cafeteria to kids who are used to buying lunch from street vendors.
After the students read their introductory sentences to their desk pods, Tovar ushers one shy boy, Kevin, a native Spanish speaker, to the podium to deliver his sentences aloud to the class. Standing beneath inspirational posters of Abraham Lincoln and Steve Jobs, the tentative teen, inaudible over the nervous squeak of his black-and-red high-top sneakers, stumbles over his sentences: “Hello. My name is Kevin.” Tovar encourages Kevin, applauding his attempts but not allowing him to return to his seat until he’s read his introduction clearly and forcefully while making eye contact with the rest of the class. Three tries later, success.
“When they feel safe enough to take risks and safe enough to fail, that’s when I know I’ve created a safe environment,” says Tovar.
Tovar understands firsthand the challenges immigrant students face. He was born in Texas, but his parents immigrated back to Monterrey, Mexico, soon after his birth. In the 1970s, when Tovar was three, the family moved to California, where he primarily spoke Spanish until he entered the public school system in Kingsburg, a largely white city five miles from Selma. Tovar remembers learning English via cassette tapes, isolated from his peers, and the teachers forbidding him to speak Spanish to his friends. When Tovar’s third-grade teacher treated him with warmth and openness, it transformed his experience. “That was the initial seed that made me want to be a teacher for students who are like me, to connect with them where they are and validate their identity,” says Tovar. “When I’m able to say ‘María’ instead of ‘Mary’ or ‘Jesús’ instead of ‘Jesse,’ it says something to the students.”
Since Tovar entered school nearly 50 years ago, the predominant pedagogical philosophy regarding English-language learners has shifted away from isolation and toward integration. In other classes, Tovar’s students learn algebra and American history alongside schoolmates who’ve lived in the United States all their lives. In his classroom, they learn English alongside peers from all over the world.
Efforts to secure support for immigrant students are especially vital now, when their American right to education is under threat. The Heritage Foundation, which has shaped policies for a possible 2025 Republican presidency, has called for reconsidering Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court case that guarantees access to public education for all children in the United States, regardless of citizenship status. If the conservative Supreme Court overturned Plyler v. Doe, it would fall to states to enshrine protections for noncitizen students—the most vulnerable of whom are often newcomers. Tovar’s work, both organizing educators and successfully advocating for California’s A.B. 714, can serve as a blueprint.
“California has done so much of the groundbreaking work that other places are learning from,” says Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a fellow at the Century Foundation think tank and a cofounder of the National Newcomer Network who advocates for school integration and newcomer students. Her grandparents emigrated from Mexico to the Central Valley, where they worked in lemon and avocado fields. When Vázquez Baur travels from New York City to visit family in the Valley, she feels the legacy of that activism in the land. “There are ancestors there that have been advocating for the rights of our families to live, work safely with dignity, go to school, and receive an education,” she says. “When I drive through the fields, there’s a silence and a power that brings me to silence.”
Tovar often invites teachers and others working in education into his newcomer class. Today’s special guest: Ramón Martinez, who graduated from Tovar’s class 10 years ago. Martinez is an affable, confident adult, a nursing school graduate in Fresno who dances and teaches baile folklórico. He speaks candidly to the kids in Spanish about what he was like when he sat in their small seats in Tovar’s classroom: He felt nervous and shy. The students hang on every word. “It opened me up, to learn that I wasn’t alone,” he tells them. “Being present with people who are also learning another language motivates you.” He shows them photos: Martinez at age 11, showing off a toothy grin in Guanajuato with his siblings; Martinez with his family as he graduated from high school, on the same campus where many of those listening will start in the fall. The boys look wide-eyed at a photo of him dancing folklórico, in disbelief that this adult spent his teenage years confidently twirling across a stage in costume. One asks in Spanish, “Is that really you?”
Martinez models the confident communication that Tovar taught him a decade ago, standing tall with his hands clasped behind his back, the same posture that Kevin attempted earlier in the morning. He tells them that speaking Spanish is an asset, not a disadvantage. Sitting beside a sticker that reads “I can reach my goals,” 13-year-old Ximena Reyes asks him what challenges he faced when he first moved to the United States. Martinez talks about being the first generation in his family to graduate from high school, let alone college, and the girl nods.
“Sometimes I don’t understand, and I feel very embarrassed to ask things,” says Reyes, who immigrated to the United States from Colima, Mexico, in January. “I like being in this class because there are a lot of people who understand.”•
Charley Locke often writes about youth and elders for publications including the Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in Oakland, California.
