Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will open a small new high school in southwest Charlotte next month that’s designed to give immigrant teenagers a better shot at graduation and career success.
CMS has more students who are unable to speak English fluently than any other district in North Carolina — more than 27,000 last year, the majority of them Spanish speakers. Wake County is a distant second with about 17,400.
Those who come to the United States as adolescents face especially steep challenges — and low graduation rates.
“We are losing our kids, especially in the ninth and 10th grades,” says Nadja Trez, the CMS executive in charge of helping immigrant students. “They are not even making it to the 11th grade because for whatever those circumstances, they are just not able to stay at school.”
Last year only 58% of English learners in CMS graduated on time, far below the rate of 83% for all CMS students. It’s also below the statewide rate of 67% for English learners. Trez has been trying to figure out how to do better.
“I studied this program for four years, and I traveled all over the country. So we just designed this program based on what is working, based on different models,” she said this week.
“This program” is PACE Academy, which opens Aug. 28 with about 250 ninth and 10th graders who recently arrived in the United States and tested as having low English skills. It will be housed at Waddell High School on Nations Ford Road.
PACE stands for Personalized Academic Command of English. It’s modeled on a network of schools for English learners in California, New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Trez says it will be a first for North Carolina.
Many programs move students into other schools as soon as they master basic English skills. PACE will keep students for four years, with small class sizes, career-tech tracks and flexible scheduling for teens who work during school hours. Classes will be taught in English — as Trez notes, “at the end of the day, they have to take the tests in English.”
But there will be lots of bilingual staff to support Spanish-speaking students and families, as well as translation for those who speak other languages.
“So hopefully they will graduate on time with (the) highest graduation rate ever in the history of Charlotte-Meck,” Trez said. “That’s my goal and that’s my dream, and I’m so excited to work with our Principal Garcia to make that happen.”
Alejandra Garcia, PACE Academy’s principal, is a rare Hispanic principal in CMS. She’s leaving Governors’ Village STEM Academy to open PACE Academy.
Garcia is a native of Colombia. Her own children speak English, Spanish and — thanks to a CMS language-immersion magnet — Japanese.
She believes that multilingual students are not just as capable as typical American students, but may even be more so. She talks about metacognition: “Being able to understand more vocabulary that comes your way because you have different vocabulary banks in your brain. Right? So, like, if somebody is speaking Portuguese we could understand. Somebody speaks Italian we could understand. Because the metacognition allows us to be able to grasp from all those different venues that we have and be able to put it together.”
The Waddell building has 74 classrooms, enough to hold at least 1,700 students. That means it'll be less than 15% full this year. An aviation magnet was supposed to join PACE in the Waddell building this year but it didn’t draw enough applicants.
Garcia says she’s confident she can have it ready for 2024. That means building interest by the time next year’s magnet lottery takes place this winter. The program is designed to provide career training for PACE students as well as those who opt in.
Garcia has a history of success with tough assignments. At Governors Village, she handled the controversial merger of a magnet and a neighborhood school into one large K-8 school. Before that she was principal at Nation’s Ford Elementary, a stone’s throw from Waddell, which was majority Hispanic and had low academic performance.
Now she hopes to set a statewide example.
“If you go to California, if you go to New York City, if you go to Texas, states that have a high influence of immigrants that speak another language, they have been very, very successful,” she said. “In North Carolina academic achievement for our ESL students is still lacking. So our goal is to be able to show here that it is possible.”
There’s room for PACE to grow, too. Last year CMS used interpreters to contact families of eighth- and ninth-graders who might qualify. Trez says the families of about 600 voiced interest. CMS capped the first class at 250 to allow for a small start.
“We really want to get the model right this year and then open it up,” Garcia said. “Next year we’ll have 11th and 12th graders, and there is no cap.”
