It’s just a two-hour drive south on I-65 from Louisville to get to Bowling Green. The city is one of many in the nation to welcome recent immigrants, with its education efforts receiving some national acclaim.
Bowling Green has dedicated an 11-room high school to the education of recent immigrants and refugees from Somalia, Iraq, Ethiopia, Burma, Bhutan and across Latin America. The new school opened last August next to Warren Central High, and is home to about 185 teenagers in grades 9 through 12.
The city of 60,000 has welcomed about 3,000 refugees over the past 5 years, a recent article in the Washington Post states.
The immigrant and refugee kids often arrive with no English skills. Some were even illiterate in their own languages. Many had also experienced poverty and brutality back home that most American teens simply don’t know about or understand.
Yet nearly three-quarters of the students learning English are graduating on time, compared with an also-impressive 93 percent of the other students.
Bowling Green’s school is connected to the Internationals Network for Public Schools in New York, which has 27 affiliated schools across the nation. The approach is to teach students English while they are also learning math, history and other subjects.
The school’s principal said it’s important that students know “it’s safe here — emotionally and physically.”
An experienced immigration law attorney can help those who are seeking asylum and those refugees with related immigration problems. You can contact the Vickerstaff Law Office here in Louisville for more information.
