Educational Equity for Undocumented Students and Students from Mixed-Immigration Status Families in Arizona: Building Capacity, Alignment, and Power with Aliento

Abstract

Despite the legal and moral responsibility of our education system to provide a public education to all students regardless of immigration status, inequities persist throughout the education system. Arizona is a particularly hostile state for undocumented students and families and has passed a number of exclusionary laws that block educational opportunities for students on the basis of immigration status. The combination of the structural barriers that students face, along with the destructive effects of racism and xenophobia, limits young people’s ability to thrive. Aliento is a nonprofit organization based in Mesa, Arizona, that advocates for students to realize their potential, unlimited by their immigration status. Aliento brings an important perspective to this work, as all of its leaders have direct lived experiences with the barriers and challenges that undocumented students and their family face, including growing up in mixed-immigration status families, being DACAmented, or being undocumented. In working to address the structural barriers that students from mixed-immigration status families face, Aliento has developed several programs to support student resilience (e.g., after-school programming, student clubs, leadership development fellowship).

During my residency, I led the development of a strategy to expand Aliento’s program model within Mesa Public Schools, the largest school district in Arizona. In this capstone, I provide research on design elements for institutional support for undocumented students: physical and emotional safety, social capital, psychological resilience, and equitable postsecondary pathways. I argue that community-based organizations have expertise to offer school districts in how to build these student supports but lack the operational capacity to provide programming to all students across the district. I further argue that employing both business development methods (e.g., defining value proposition, program optimization) and community organizing can support school system transformation for equity. I recommend ways that community-based organizations can work strategically within their capacity to make an impact for marginalized students. As a result of my findings, I urge the K–12 education sector to invest in partnerships between school districts and community-based organizations to advance equity, particularly organizations led by proximate leaders.