Fort Worth ISD brings counseling to campuses for some of its most vulnerable students

Refugee students in the Fort Worth Independent School District will soon have access to on-campus counseling services to help them navigate challenges they face in starting school in a new country.

The district’s school board approved a memorandum of understanding allowing Catholic Charities Fort Worth to place certified counselors on campuses to work with students whose families were resettled in the area.

The change, which will take effect at the beginning of the upcoming school year, builds on a longstanding partnership between Fort Worth ISD and Catholic Charities.

Catholic Charities has offered a range of services to refugee students for years, including tutoring and crisis intervention. The organization also offers support and professional development to teachers in order to help them understand how best to support refugee students. Those services are funded through the Refugee School Impact Program , a grant program run by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement , and come at no cost to the district.

Catholic Charities already offers counseling services for refugee students in Fort Worth ISD. But in years past, school leaders have had to send students off campus to receive those services, said Cesar Padilla, a spokesperson for the district. If students had to leave school for a counseling appointment, they often ended up missing a half day to a full day of school, he said. Bringing those services on campus allows those students to access counseling with less disruption to the rest of their school day, he said.

Alyse Chung, a spokesperson for Catholic Charities Fort Worth , said counseling services are an important component of the support the organization offers refugee students. Those students often carry physical and emotional trauma and struggle to adapt to life in the United States, she said.

The number of immigrant students in Texas’ schools has grown rapidly over the past decade, climbing by about 74% from the 2012-13 school year to the 2022-23 school year, according to a report from the Texas Education Agency.

In an interview last month, Marie Mendoza, executive director of Fort Worth ISD’s emergent bilingual department, said newcomers — English learners who have recently immigrated to the United States — make up a small but growing share of the district’s emergent bilingual population. About 2,000 newcomers were enrolled in the district during the most recent school year, she said.

Not all of those newcomers are refugees, but still many who face daunting challenges when they come into the American education system, Mendoza said. Many had their schooling interrupted by the circumstances in their home countries, she said. Some may never have attended school before coming to the United States. Others attended school in refugee camps, where instruction often looked vastly different from the norms either in their home country or in the United States.