Raven Report X Stanford University

RAVEN REPORT

SEQUOIA HIGH SCHOOL X STANFORD UNIVERSITY NEWS MAGAZINE VOLUME I // DECEMBER 2023

FEATURE: REFLECTIONS FROM AN ALUM: EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, IMMIGRATION

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04 UNCOVERING THE MULTIFACETED DEMOGRAPHICS OF SEQUOIA HIGH SCHOOL 04

By Ana Elena Smith WHAT IS IN A LABEL?

By Ana Elena Smith

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ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATIONS OF LATECOMER STUDENTS

By Ana Elena Smith

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WHY PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE DREAM CLUB?

By Diego De Nault

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LIFE IN A NEW COUNTRY

By Priya Ansnes, Sasha Efimchik, and Caroline Sieling

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REFLECTIONS ON SEQUOIA HIGH SCHOOL VOLUNTEERING

By Karen Hoshino

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

A note from our editor-in-chief

My freshman year at Stanford was filled with the allure of independence and the excitement of a new experience at college. I was eager to distance myself from home, to pretend that Palo Alto was a world apart from Redwood City. No, I would not go home for dinner at my parent’s house, nor would I go back to our church each Sunday. I wanted to indulge the illusion of having gone to a far-off new place for college.

At one point that first quarter I remember receiving an email about a work or volunteer experience at Sequoia.

I thought it was ironic that I wanted to branch off into a new world and yet Stanford seemed to be pushing me back to Sequoia.

The Thanksgiving of my junior year, as my family and I sat and ate desert, I proudly told them about my involvement with a Stanford club teaching English to immigrant youth at the border. One family friend present was working with newcomer youth at Garfield Elementary School at the time and told me about the challenges of being an educator for that population.

At the end of the conversation, she mentioned something along the lines of, “you know, there are plenty of people in Redwood City who would benefit from the help the Stanford club is doing… why are you not working with them?"

Her comment stuck with me and come the spring of that year, when I received an email about a volunteering opportunity at Sequoia, I knew I had to do it.

I could choose to volunteer at a geometry, biology, or history class taught entirely in Spanish for new Sequoia students who had just arrived to the United States. Learning that Sequoia welcomed 5-10 newly arrived students each week left me in shock—how had I been oblivious to this before?

To capture these reflections, I embarked on creating my own version of the Raven Report, making a space to explore how my time at Stanford reshaped my understanding of Sequoia.

Through this project, I invite you to ponder what Sequoia meant and means to you. Were you aware of the multitude of immigrant youth who walked the halls alongside us? If so, why was this never discussed, either inside or outside the classroom? For those, like me, who were unaware, how does this newfound knowledge color your understanding of your four years at Sequoia?

I hope this report sparks reflections and provides insight into experiences outside of our IB cohort bubble. I hope you enjoy the pieces included, written by me and other Sequoia community members, in my first attempt at journalism.

Ana Elena Smith

ABOUT THE RAVEN REPORT IS A Sequoia High School student publication. While this report is modeled after the publication, it is not affiliated with, written by, nor representative of the views of the Sequoia High School Raven Report. To see reports written by Sequoia students, visit www.ravenreport.org. This report was created as a senior project for the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity department at Stanford University.

THE RAVEN REPORT STRIVES TO provide the Sequoia High School community with informative, engaging, and relevant news.

CONTACT

Feel free to get in touch with me after reading this report. I would love to discuss your reactions, reflections, and insights on this topic.

If you are interested in volunteering at Sequoia, you can find more information at the link bellow.

Volunteer at Sequoia

aesmith1@stanford.edu

RAVEN REPORT // 22-23 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Ana Elena Smith

REPORTERS Diego De Nault Priya Ansnes Sasha Efimchik Caroline Sieling Karen Hoshino

RAVEN REPORT | DECEMBER 2023

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Uncovering the Multifaceted Demographics of Sequoia High School English language learners (ELLs) represent a significant percentage of the student body of American public schools. The number of ELL students in public elementary and secondary schools nationwide increased dramatically from 2000 to 2020, jumping from 3,793,764 to 4,963,388 students. That represents a change from 8.1% of total enrollment to 10.3%.

Sequoia High School Demographics

Situated in a vibrant immigrant community, Sequoia High School has twice the national average of English learner students. In part, this is because Sequoia High School receives 5-10 newly arrived unaccompanied minors each week. These students predominantly come from Central America, Mexico, and Venezuela, and enter with varying levels of prior education. In the 2018-2019 school year, there were 403 English language learner students out of the roughly 2000-person student body, or approximately 20%. The vast majority of ELL students are Spanish speakers, and as such there are specialized geometry, history, and biology classes taught in Spanish for the newcomers.

English Learner Students by Language by Grade Sequoia High School, 2018-19

International Baccalaureate Demographics

On the other hand, of the approximately 500 students in the senior class of 2019, only 58 were IB diploma candidates, according to data from the Sequoia High School 2019-2020 School Profile. There is no data on how many English language learner students were part of the International Baccalaureate diploma cohort, but given that you must take advanced English from sophomore year onwards in order to complete the diploma, it is unlikely that those students started in the English learner classrooms.

Moreover, while the ethnic statistics of the IB cohort are not released, the socioeconomic breakdown reveals that only 24% were “low income free and reduced lunch” students compared with 49% in the student body as a whole. Most of the 58 IB diploma candidates in 2019 came from North Star and Central, by far the two most affluent local middle schools, reinforcing the notion that the IB cohort was not representative of the broader Sequoia community. The IB diploma cohort and English learner students were in essence mutually exclusive groups.

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Stanford University in Sequoia

Last winter, I took Introduction to Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. The professor was irritated that academia often exists within a vacuum. Seeking to contribute to the Bay Area community, he designed our class in tandem with a local high school. The local high school was just beginning to implement an ethnic studies class for its freshman. Our task: to shadow a class at the high school and then create a sample lesson plan for the teachers. When the professor announced the local high school was none other than Sequoia, I felt proud to be the only one in that hundred-person auditorium to have gone there.

When it was my turn to visit Sequoia with other classmates, I couldn’t help but feel it was a silly excursion for me to take part of. I was a student there for four years, I didn’t need to be introduced to the school in the same way as my peers. What would I take away from this experience?

Walking through Sequoia for the first time in years, I felt detached from the school. It felt odd walking around with my visitor’s name tag, feeling like an outsider at the same time as a sense of comfort enveloped me from being somewhere so important to me. As we meandered around the B-wing, climbed up to the second floor, past the journalism classroom, and into the history hallway, I was caught off guard to hear that the students we were passing were all speaking in Spanish. Taking a seat in the classroom, my gaze wandered to the posters along the walls. Posters echoing the message that no human being is illegal and everyone is welcome here dotted the walls, just like when I was a student. The teacher passed out a handout on Sequoia High School Feeder Schools to show us what the class had been learning about. I had always thought of Central and North Star as being predominantly white schools compared to Kennedy and McKinley being predominantly Hispanic and was surprised to have this affirmed in the ethnic data. What conversations would have been sparked from this ethnic studies class had it been created my freshman year?

After the visit, the Stanford Students I drove with talked about how surprised they were by the school – its beauty, size, open-air layout... They were particularly struck by how inclusive and left-leaning several of the posters were, reflecting on how their high schools had no such signage. Over that car ride back to Stanford, swapping high school stories, I realized I had a lot to unpack and reflect on surrounding my time at Sequoia.

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What is in a Label?

In the literature surrounding immigrant youth in the United States, authors use a wide variety of labels to refer to this group. As Sophia Angeles states in her work "Exploring High School Newcomer Youths' Futures: Academic and Career Aspirations:" "there is a need to question how labels used to identify students' needs either 'reinforce essentialized stereotypes or open up new understandings.'"

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s of "immigran gardles e r t students , h t u o h y s who enroll t li the first ti ran Eng ig s in U.S. sch a m m d e im a ie s d if a e s d ools for s o iv le r e la s r cents, but hav re c tly a a d n n o e a h w c ho do so a e w ls r , o " s s o u ta h t rt c a t of the sch fter the gal s to US s rs." ool year" their le ree yea entry in h t n " o s o t p re u p tu s Fu ouths’ hools u learner Elaine C. omer Y d US sc e Allard “Lat l Newc d o n o e h t c ecomers at hS in th ng Hig ri

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Newcomer cont.

The term includes, but is not limit ed to, "asylees, refugees, unaccompanied youth, undocum ented youth, migratory students" who come from "many different countries with diverse cultural backgrounds… with vario us levels of educational experiences and speak[ing] a varie ty of languages, which may or may not include English."

The Sequoia Union High School

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English Language Learners (ELL)

"students who speak a language other than English and are acquiring English in school" "From English Language Learners to Emergent Bilinguals"

by Ofelia García et al

District Page

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Ethnographic Explorations of Latecomer Students “Latecomers in the New Latino Diaspora” by Elaine C. Allard delves into the experience of latecomer students and their challenges of assimilation and acculturation within the classroom. Allard notes that many of the latecomer students were late to join the classroom due to a lack of information, administrative obstacles, conflicts with their job, and/or the absence of a guardian in the United States. Some students did not even know they were legally required to attend school in the United States. Through her meticulous ethnographic research, Allard uncovers the uncertainty teachers experience in integrating latecomers both socially and academically. Striking a delicate balance between catching the latecomer up and maintaining the flow of the ongoing lesson plan is a challenge, as detailed in Allard’s field notes. The consensus of the teachers Allard interviewed was that latecomers struggle to recover the content they missed, which becomes one of the major challenges for latecomers.

In a poignant anecdote, the geometry teacher I volunteer for, Ms. Sterne shared her experience of falling ill with COVID a few years ago. When she returned to the classroom after two weeks of sick leave, her class had doubled in size. Another year, at the beginning of the school year, only a handful of students were placed into her geometry class. Two weeks later, so many kids had enrolled that she had to open a third period of geometry for emerging multilingual learners. Over the two months I volunteered in one of her classes this fall, four new students joined. One particular week, after Ms. Sterne distributed the classwork handout, I noticed the new student staring blankly at it. I went up to her and introduced myself, offering help. She told me she was from Mexico and was looking forward to completing her physical so she could start playing sports at Sequoia. I walked her through her class notes, and we did a couple of problems together. As class went on, she got more comfortable with me and her peers, adapting quickly to the new classroom environment. At the end of class Ms. Sterne expressed her gratitude at having an extra set of hands to give that personalized instruction and fill in gaps Ms. Sterne is unable to attend to. Volunteering at Sequoia is meaningful to me for a myriad of reasons, but knowing the difficulties of the latecomer student experience and being able to help mitigate them in some form is perhaps one of the takeaways that stands out to me most from this quarter.

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Why people don't know about the Dream Club?

by Diego De Nault

Class of Sequoia '2019

One of the things I remember most vividly about the first few months of my sophomore year at Sequoia is the sound of NPR on the radio—my dad insisted that it play in the mornings and at night while he cooked. Those broadcasts obsessed over immigration. The reality of unauthorized border crossings and the hatred levied towards people who have come to the US this way was old, but there was an intensity to the outrage that seemed new. It was 2016, time for a new president, and that year’s leading Republican was stoking flames that had been burning low for a long time.

I heard those stories but I didn’t think much of them. What could I do? I was 15 years old and had just spent the last period eating lunch alone under a tree, surrounded by people who had probably known eachother since middle school. I wasn’t thinking about how volunteering would look on a college resume or how the issues I heard about on the news were affecting people in my community, I just wanted friends at my new school. When my seat partner in history class started talking to me, that’s what was on my mind. She invited me to join a club and explained that it was trying to help students who didn’t have the legal status required for scholarships or job applications. I said I’d stop by during the next meeting. It felt good—maybe I had just made a friend.

I realized very quickly that Dream Club was no time to lounge around getting to know each other over a shared interest. It was serious work.

The club holds yearly events that require preparation. Along with some older members, I was tasked with collecting information about the current state of immigration law in California, that fiery subject from the news. I needed to help build a presentation for the “Know Your Rights” panel at the club’s yearly conference and I was worried.

The ESL teacher at the helm of Dream Club could be tough. Miss Slater wanted things done on time and she wanted them done well. Immigration law is complex and even though I needed to prepare only a surface-level picture of it, I was intimidated.

I joked about my anxieties with my new friend and she told me that Miss Slater had been leading the club since before 2010, when the California DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act passed the State Senate. That act was part of a broader movement to pass similar legislation across the country (which also inspired the club’s name). Slater might be tough but she had been working hard to keep things moving year after year. I also learned that my new friend was undocumented. Miss Slater was close to her, helping her through the challenges of high school and with considerations about what her status meant for the future. She did this for many people in the club and she didn’t stop there. Miss Slater formed relationships in her ESL classes with many students from undocumented families.

She was a bit of safety and support in a school system that wasn’t designed to serve people with the particular challenges that come with being undocumented. Somehow, after all that, she even found time to give me advice about volunteering opportunities and, eventually, college applications.

Without the club, I wouldn’t have seen how many undocumented students cycle through Sequoia—even that picture was skewed; not every undocumented student at Sequoia feels comfortable advertising that part of themselves by joining the club. It’s impossible for someone like me to know what being undocumented is like, how it would feel to have your legal status tugging at you all the time. But being a member of Dream Club gave me a window, hazy and incomplete, into

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that feeling. I’m grateful for the experience, for all it’s taught me about empathy and giving room to people who aren’t like me, but it was never part of the plan. If it weren’t for my friend and Miss Slater, I would not have joined Dream Club.

It would have been background noise, vague and disconnected from me like those news stories.

Reflecting on it now, I think that’s how it is for a lot of Sequoia’s students.

People tend to fall in with others who are like them and in the Bay Area where things are so stratified by class, that cuts the student body along certain lines. People coming in from the wealthy middle schools like North Star and Central tend to form groups with other people from those schools. Undocumented students tend to come from families that make less; afterall, in the US most high-paying jobs require a person to be a US citizen. When someone coming from a family life that is about making ends meet encounters someone who’s parents take them to Tahoe for Ski Week and Hawaii in the summer, it can throw up a barrier between them. Even when that barrier is crossed—which it certainly is at Sequoia—an undocumented person might not feel comfortable exposing a part of themself that makes them more vulnerable, just like any high schooler would feel. This schism is only widened as students move into more advanced classes.

The IB program is difficult by any standard. It’s nearly impossible if you’re translating important documents for parents or working a job to help support yourself on the side. My IB classes were filled with students who had plenty of time for extracurriculars and study, and whose parents could afford an expensive college counselor.

These advantages strengthen that barrier. The fact that an IB student’s schedule will consist almost exclusively of IB classes assures that opportunities like the one I had with my friend in history class become rarer by the last two years.

There were some students who, like me, joined the club without knowing much about what it’s like to live without papers. Some of us stayed with the club and became close with its members, but others stopped showing up after a few meetings. Dream Club is serious work and when you’re entering that space, it can feel alienating. It’s a sensitive topic and people need time to open up to newcomers. It’s not really fair to give up on the club—what is a few weeks of lonely meetings to the alienation one feels being undocumented?—but it’s high school and people are trying to fit in. What’s the point of working hard when you have lots of other extracurriculars that are already keeping you away from friends you may have known since elementary school?

I joined Dream Club during my first semester at Sequoia. It was sophomore year and I had just moved back to the US from Brazil. That circumstance, and my friend’s kindness, pushed me down a path that others missed. And I mean pushed. The three years I spent in Dream Club weren’t initiated by me, they started because someone who knew what it was like seeing the school as if from the outside reached out. If it weren’t for her, I could have looked right past Dream Club and the people it helps, like noise on the radio.

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"Life in a new country" was written by current Sequoia High School students and published in the Raven Report. You can find it on their website: www.ravenreport.org

Art by Sasha Efimchik

Life in a new country Sequoia’s ELD (English Language Development) program allows for non-English speaking students to attend Sequoia High School. This program gives many immigrant students access to American education. Many of these students are still learning English, but have stories that should be heard. Two students shared theirs for the Raven Report. They are identified with alternative names for privacy reasons.

AUTHORS Priya Ansnes Sasha Efimchik Caroline Sieling

ELI [How often can you communicate with your family in Guatemala?]

“I communicate with them on various days because sometimes I am here at school and they are working, selling for their store. So I can’t communicate much with them [very often].”

[Why did you leave Guatemala to be here?]

“So I came here because my sister came with my uncle at 16 and she spent her whole life here. And then after seven years he sent for me to come in August. I left my home and came with my other sister who is here and thank God I [was let into America] and am here. It was a great opportunity for me because it was a dream I had and so I am very grateful for that.”

[Where are you from?]

“I am from Guatemala, I am from a very big city called “Quetzaltenango.” I was born in a town called Chiantla. So I was born in an apartment more or less. I started my life there, I grew up there. I had different stages of childhood.”

[How has school been in the U.S.?] “…school has not been difficult for me at all, they gave me my schedule and I became more independent in my classes.”

[What do you think the difference is between being born in the United States and moving here?]

“People who are born here in the United States have a little more opportunities than people who are born in other countries, where there are [less] resources.

TRANSCRIPTION Carmen Victoria Cuevas Contreras

It would be good to [get to know other] Latin Americans so we could know each other’s history and have more ways to help others who need them.”

MARIA [Where are you from?]

“The capital of Guatemala [Guatemala City].”

[How does it feel being away from Guatemala?]

“I felt sad because I didn’t get to return to see my dad and after a year that I was here, my father was killed in Guatemala.”

[What encouraged you to come to the U.S.?]

“I wanted to come here because I had my mom and there are possibilities here [for] a better life.”

[What was something that scared you when you got here?]

“When I arrived here I was thinking and wondering, when I am going to go to Guatemala again?”

[Why did you end up at Sequoia? How has being here affected you?]

“I came to Sequoia because my cousin graduated here and she said they speak Spanish and English and at Woodside, which is closer to me, they only speak English and I was not going to feel comfortable… It has helped me a lot because here at Sequoia almost everyone that I have classes with and almost everyone speaks spanish. I feel that many are from Guatemala and I feel comfortable.”

TRANSLATION Haylee Huynh Allison Wang

DATE October 16, 2023

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REFLECTIONS ON SEQUOIA HIGH SCHOOL VOLUNTEERING

by Karen Hoshino, M.A. Latin American Studies Candidate As an international student from Japanese/Taiwanese and Brazilian roots, my experience of coming to the United States has been very different from the students I volunteered with at Sequoia. Getting to know students from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, was a unique opportunity for me to understand the complexities of moving to the United States in their conditions. This experience has ultimately informed me of my own misconceptions and shaped my drive to want to do meaningful work that helps multicultural students in academic settings.

While I volunteered, a few things that stood out to me were that most of them do not come with their immediate family, and some of them have to even work and send back money to their families. I learned that some students were never in school before, and their understanding of reading and writing is very limited. I also learned that some students decide to drop out of school because they do not find the meaning to pursuing education. Why would I go to school if I won’t be attending university afterwards? Why learn now, when I have to work and provide for my family? These were only a few questions that my students pondered. My experience as a teaching assistant and coach made me realize how little I knew about their situation, and it shaped me to reconsider all my assumptions. My hope is that more people will have the opportunity to understand complexities of these children, and re-evaluate students’ experiences as they experience racial, ethnic, and gender identities.

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RAVEN RIDDLES 1

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Across 4. Where most of the students I volunteered with were from 5. Venezuela may invade this country 6. Introduced a state of exception in El Salvador last year

Down 1. Mayan people living in the midwestern highlands of 3 across 2. One of the mostwidely spoken indigenous languages of the Americas 3. Capital of Nicaragua