The long lines of last year, where foreign parents and their children camped out at DeKalb County Schools headquarters hoping not to miss a rumored registration deadline, are a thing of the past.
DeKalb County school officials said they’ve been getting the word out for months now to alert parents of international students that the registration process for the coming year is year-round.
Last year, families whose children mostly speak languages other than English caught wind of a rumor that registration had to be completed by a certain date, causing many to line the sidewalks around the DeKalb County School District headquarters in Stone Mountain.
About 22,000 of 101,000 of DeKalb County students, roughly one-fifth, are classified as international.
“We are sort of the pulse of what’s going on in international politics and the world,” said Sandra Núñez, director of the district’s International Welcome Center. “Our international student population is the result of something that happened out there somewhere.”
Monday morning, more than 1,200 international students had been registered for the 2015-2016 school year. Unlike previous years, workers spent time handing out appointment cards to parents as they came into the center, with 50 being scheduled each day.
At the International Welcome Center, parents are paired with translators, if needed, who help collect from them the child’s international transcripts and vaccination information. The students are then tested to determine whether they are academically on par with other children with whom they would be learning.
“It’s a lot more than putting a book bag on the back of a child,” Núñez said.
Translators who work for the district speak a variety of languages, from Spanish to French, Burmese and Nepali. Núñez said most of the international population is due to refugee resettlement in the area. DeKalb County is the largest refugee-resettlement district in the state and has relationships with several organizations that help refugees adjust to new areas.
The numbers of international students are going up in other districts as well. At the end of the 2014-2015 school year, 2,100 Atlanta Public Schools students were served by the English to Speakers of Other Languages program, up from 1,500 in 2010, spokeswoman Kimberly Willis Green said Monday. A majority of APS’ international students come from Central and South America, but more students have come in previous years from China, Saudi Arabia and West African countries such as Ghana and Guinea.
Rubi Kumar and his wife, Suvarchala, arrived at DeKalb’s International Welcome Center at 8:30 a.m. Monday to register their 9-year-old daughter for the upcoming school year. The family is in the states from India because of Rubi Kumar’s work with SunTrust Bank. He said the process was well organized. He’d gotten a head start on the district’s website, which tells parents what to bring with them as they prepare to pre-enroll their children.
Five hours after arriving at the International Welcome Center, the family was on the way home, their child registered for classes.
What hasn’t been easy in the transition to the states? Getting a driver’s license.
“It took about a month,” Kumar said, chuckling and shaking his head.
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