Bilingual Youth
Authors:   , Lowe Shontia L. , Kelly Kristy E 
Published: November 2022

District and school-level leaders continue to experience ongoing challenges in the design and in the implementation of supports for immigrant youth that have recently arrived in the United States (U.S.), who speak little to no English, and who are unfamiliar with the U.S. school system (Umansky, et al, 2020). There has also been an increased demand placed on education systems by these youth, with states and local education agencies struggling to address their needs (Sugarman, 2015). With the high rates of these recently arrived youth in the U.S., school systems are experiencing continued challenges in meeting these youth's needs (Sugarman, 2015). The challenge of meeting these youth's needs in our education systems and in our local education agencies, is exacerbated as the youth get older. Prior research has suggested that teen immigrants are worse performing when compared to earlier entering immigrants, or when compared to those who were born in the U. S (Stiefel, et al., 2010). Consequently, to mitigate the school district level challenges in the design and implementation of supports, and to address the increased demand placed on education systems by these students for services that address their needs, this study has given voice to this demographic, so that school systems can better identify the needed supports, and so they can streamline the process of service identification and service provision programmatically, for this rapidly growing sect of the public school's high school population. This is at the school and at the district levels, and so that the states and local education agencies would not continue to struggle to address these recently arrived immigrants' needs (Sugarman, 2015). As a result, the purpose of this phenomenological research study was to explore the lived experiences of what the researcher terms "Aspiring Bilingual Immigrant Youth" (ABIY) in U.S. high schools, given the difficulties these youth experience when immigrating in their high school years. This study consisted of nine semi-structured individual interviews, and one focus group that consisted of four participants from the individual interviews, to understand the perspective and essence of their lived experiences reflectively, upon their entrance into U.S. high schools and overall (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The research questions that informed this study included: (1) How do study participants describe their academic and social experiences when they first enter(ed) U.S. public high schools? (2) What academic and social support services did participants use in U.S. high schools? (3) What academic and social support was meaningful for participants when they first entered U.S. high schools? Through these questions, the experiences of these youth were described, to capture the essence of their experiences in U.S. high schools, and their support service needs were explored. With this research, the purpose is to inform education policies, programs, and practices related to this demographic, and to negate the dearth in research and resolutions that centers their voices in policy, program, and practice decision-making processes. Also, this research's purpose was for their needs identification and subsequent support services provision components to emerge, given this demographic's growth and increasing demand on our public high school education systems and local education agencies.