Nadia Madan-Morrow found herself in a bind Tuesday morning. She was short 11 teachers.

Some accompanied fifth-graders on an overnight trip into the mountains, while others called out sick because they had COVID-19 — a sign that three years after the pandemic began, both the virus and the statewide shortage of substitute teachers continue to plague schools.

But the principal of Denver’s Place Bridge Academy wasn’t just scrambling to staff classrooms last week. She faced another problem: The lunch period for seventh- and eighth-graders has swelled to more than 200 students — too many to supervise all at once — after an unprecedented number of migrant children enrolled in Place Bridge since the start of the school year.

“This influx of kiddos is happening on top of all of the other challenges schools are facing after the pandemic,” Madan-Morrow said.

Her school, which serves preschoolers through middle schoolers in southeast Denver, is on the frontline of the city’s migrant crisis — but it’s not alone. A flood of children arrived in metro Denver after their families crossed the southern U.S. border in search of better lives, and school districts from Westminster to Douglas County are welcoming them into their classrooms.

At Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest district, more than 2,000 newcomer students — the term DPS uses to classify children new to this country — have enrolled since July, including 500 in October alone.

The wave of mostly Spanish-speaking students is so great that it has the potential to reverse the district’s years-long trend of declining enrollment, although it’s unclear just how many of the children will settle in Denver and stay in the city’s schools, especially as many of their families struggle to find housing.

“It’s a lot more kids than we’ve ever had come this quickly,” said Adrienne Endres, executive director of DPS’s multilingual education department, adding, “We’re doing everything in our power to welcome and keep them here.”

Almost all of Denver’s schools have enrolled migrant students at some point this semester. The district is unable to say exactly how many schools are teaching newcomers, because when a family leaves a shelter for more permanent housing, DPS doesn’t always know where the students end up, spokesman Scott Pribble said.

The sudden and unexpected surge in students has exacerbated staffing shortages that have persisted at schools since the pandemic, leaving administrators racing to find enough Spanish-speaking educators to teach classes and supervise lunch and recess periods. DPS held a job fair last week in hopes of finding more bilingual teachers, paraprofessionals and special education staff.

There are other challenges as well. Many of the new students’ education has been interrupted either by the pandemic or their long journeys to the U.S. — or both.

Nationally, educators have been under pressure to accelerate learning for all students after COVID-19 forced most pupils into online classes. The migrant children’s arrival has made that task even harder as some lack basic math and literacy skills, only speak Spanish and have no familiarity with American schooling.

The newcomers also are carrying trauma from what they experienced on their journeys to the U.S., which often involved walking through jungles and crossing rivers. Children often need help with both their physical and mental health once they arrive in Denver, Madan-Morrow said.

But DPS administrators said that, even as per-pupil funding increases with additional students, budget constraints have led to difficult decisions between hiring more teachers or school psychologists.

“Our systems weren’t prepared for this type of thing,” Madan-Morrow said.

Educators are swamped trying to help children and their families feel safe and with necessities such as housing, clothes and food. Schools have set up donation closets with food and clothes for the families, but principals said they are struggling to find enough coats and boots that the children need to survive a Colorado winter.

Housing is also proving elusive. In northwest Denver, migrant families are sleeping in hotels that only allow them to stay for just over 30 days. Once that time is up, the families have to find their own housing, which is leading many to live in tents on the street, said Alex Nelson, a fourth-grade math teacher at Bryant-Webster Dual Language School.

Among those sleeping on the streets, he said, are children as young as preschoolers.

“It’s really hard because everybody is hoping there is some resource,” Nelson said. “After we’ve done the calls, again and again, to tell people there’s actually nothing — there’s nothing for these families — when they are on the street, unless they get lucky. And that’s really hard and that’s something you carry with yourself.”

“We were not prepared for this at all”

Mathias Rico-Contreras was born in Venezuela but spent most of his life in Colombia before arriving in Denver a few months ago. He’s now a fourth-grader at Place Bridge.

The 9-year-old recalled crossing a river on a raft — he was scared he was going to fall into the water but his father grabbed him — during his journey, and how at one point, he didn’t want to keep going.

Now, in Denver, Mathias’ father works four jobs in construction and delivering food. And if there’s one thing he wants people to know about students like him, it’s that their lives aren’t easy, he said through Madan-Morrow, who served as an interpreter.

Still, Mathias said, he prefers living in the U.S.

“I want to accomplish my dream of becoming a police officer in the United States,” he said.

Place Bridge was better prepared than most for the influx of students like Mathias, as the school houses one of the district’s newcomer centers, including the only one available for elementary-aged students. Newcomer centers teach children who are new to the U.S., have limited education and minimal literacy skills in both their native language and English, and prepare them for mainstream classrooms.

Students from countries all over the world, including Afghanistan and Somalia, attend Place Bridge. Almost 50 different languages are spoken throughout its halls, and this year the language that can be heard most often is Spanish, Madan-Morrow said.

The school also has a pediatric health center via the district’s partnership with Denver Health and a community hub, which provides an array of services for families, including a food bank and clothes boutique.

But even Place Bridge is straining under the wave of migrant students.

The school has enrolled more than 180 new students this semester, including more than 150 migrant students, mostly from Venezuela. As of last week, the school enrolled 833 students — 113 more than the district projected it would have. Enrollment is now at capacity for most grades, Madan-Morrow said.

The principal’s problem with the lunch period has not yet been solved because she can’t extend the amount of time the kids have to eat, not when she has 10 grades she needs to move through the room.

“We don’t have any more tables,” she said, adding, “I almost need two cafeterias to run lunch.”

One of Madan-Morrow’s biggest challenges this school year has been finding space to put students. She hired five new teachers to create five new classrooms to meet the need created by rising enrollment, but she doesn’t have space for two of them.

Place Bridge’s library now houses three classes and an adjacent office has been turned into a separate classroom for special education students. Sometimes the classes in the library run simultaneously with only bookshelves dividing them.

Madan-Morrow also has had to shift other classes around as they grew too large with too many students. The constant changes have led at least one teacher to quit, she said.

Even schools that have struggled with declining enrollment in recent years — including some on the verge of closing just a year ago — are now seeing their classrooms fill with new pupils.

Ashley Elementary, which the district identified as having “concerning enrollment” several months ago, has enrolled more than 100 new students since the start of the academic year. Ashley went from expecting to have 198 K-5 students to having 320, Janet Estrada, the interim principal at the school in northeast Denver.

The increase in students has led to large classes, with Ashley’s Spanish bilingual class for second-graders swelling to 35 kids, she said.

“We were not prepared for this at all,” Estrada said, adding that she had to create four new classrooms and hire a new teacher from Mexico who is supposed to start after the Thanksgiving holiday.

“We have not had one week where we have not had new students enrolling,” Estrada said

“I would stay here the rest of my life”

Large classroom sizes aren’t the only concern of Estrada’s. Ashley has students who qualify for newcomer services, meaning their education has been interrupted at some point.

Third-graders are just now learning how to write their names, Estrada said.

For English language learners, DPS offers classes that are taught primarily in Spanish while slowly transitioning to more English instruction. This helps students learn class content while developing literacy skills in both languages, according to the district’s website.

Place Bridge also has students struggling with basic math and literacy skills. But the school’s bilingual program focuses on younger students and “not an entire classroom of fifth-graders without any English,” Madan-Morrow said.

“How do we adapt our curriculum that wasn’t really designed for this group of kids?” she asked.

The Denver Post spoke with five Place Bridge students who came to Denver from Venezuela. Maddan-Morrow served as an interpreter for the interviews.

The children described traveling through multiple South and Central American countries. One remembered seeing snakes and monkeys, another said butterflies followed them through the jungle. They said they attended school in some of the countries they crossed. Sometimes they went to school in a country for several months, other times only a few weeks.

The children also are having their education interrupted once they arrive in Denver because their families are struggling to find stable housing.

Natalia Gonzales-Castillo arrived in Denver two years ago from Venezuela, but the seventh-grader was unable to attend school her first year because she moved from apartment to apartment and her parents were unable to figure out how to get her into school.

Missing school made the 12-year-old feel bad because she enjoys classes and likes being around her friend, she said.

Natalia attended a private school in Venezuela, but she never liked it. Now at Place Bridge, she said she is treated better and pays more attention to her lessons, and is trying to be a good student.

“I would stay here the rest of my life,” Natalia said of living in the U.S.

“The mental health needs are extreme”

On Madan-Morrow’s desk sits a basket full of her students’ writing samples, which she has used to assess their literacy skills and whether they qualify for Place Bridge’s newcomer center.

Students have written about their journeys to the U.S., of how they trekked through jungles, climbed mountains and crossed rivers. One child described being scared of dangerous animals. Children wrote about the dead bodies — or in one student’s case, just a leg — they stumbled upon in the jungles and rivers they traversed.

“The mental health needs are extreme — to a level we have never seen before,” the principal said.

There’s a waitlist at Place Bridge’s community hub for families seeking mental health care, Madan-Morrow said.

Schools are funded based on how many pupils they have. As schools received more students than initially projected, their budgets were adjusted this fall. In a normal school year, such changes work fine and allow administrators to hire new employees — whether it’s a teacher, paraprofessional or other educator — to meet their needs, she said.

That’s why Madan-Morrow said she has been able to hire more teachers.

“The challenge is that the funding model didn’t really take into account that I also needed to hire an additional health tech because my kids have additional needs from the incredible journey they just went through,” she said, adding, “I couldn’t at this point and time get more counselors and mental health support just because we are in a new territory that we have never been in before.”

School mental health employees are discovering their roles look different than they did before the migrant students’ arrival.

Izabella Fornuto, a school psychologist at Escuela Valdez, is the only mental health provider at the northwest Denver school, which is continuing to enroll migrant students.

Fornuto’s job has become more focused on social work than ever before, meaning she’s spending more time helping families find housing and legal resources and organizing volunteers for the school’s food and clothes donation closet.

“We’re being stretched and challenged to do more because there’s more need,” she said. “I can’t ignore when a family comes to my office and says we’re going to be on the streets tomorrow with nothing.”

Students’ immediate needs — clothes, housing, food — have to be met before schools can really start to address their mental health needs, Fornuto said.

For the most part, educators said the migrant students are doing well and are happy to be here. But more settled emotions are starting to boil up in the children that have been in Denver the longest and are more established, Fornuto said.

Carrie Olson, a member of DPS’s Board of Education, recently experienced this herself. She was supervising children on the playground at Ashley Elementary when a young girl came and held her hand.

All of a sudden the child began to cry.

When Olson took the girl to a teacher, she learned the child often cries and that while school employees have been working with her, they still haven’t figured out why.

“Our kids’ stories wear on all of our hearts,” Madan-Morrow said. “We are trying to protect and nurture (them) and their stories are so hard.”

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