Tutoring and enrichment for refugee youth at BRYTE

In 2016, nearly 85,000 refugees from 79 countries were resettled in the United States. A majority of recently resettled families are from Burma, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia, where families are fleeing violence, torture, and persecution. Nearly a third of recently resettled refugees are children and adolescents. Prior to resettlement, a majority of families have limited exposure to the English language, and most children have experienced significant disruption to their education. Nearly one in three refugee children live in linguistically isolated households (no one in the household over age 14 is English‐proficient), significantly impacting parent engagement and advocacy across their children's academic settings. Due to the number of languages spoken by refugee children, most resettled children are placed in English Language Learner classrooms, where nearly all classmates speak Spanish, and often their language is not spoken by anyone in the entire school. Research has shown that acquisition of fluency in the host‐country language is one of the most important predictors of mental health in refugee children resettled in high‐income countries such as the United States. Programming to help with English‐language acquisition, homework, and understanding of the host culture has the potential to be the most important systemic intervention for resettled refugee children.