Refugee Students and Parents as Drivers of Change in San Diego Schools: The PSRO’s Story

(Re)Theorizing Refugee Student and Parent Engagement in Urban Schools

To date, the scant literature on refugees and urban schools tends to imagine refugee students through a deficit lens (DeMartino, 2020; Leonardo, 2019) and frames teachers and school leaders as the key actors responsible equipped to “solve” the problem of refugee children's educational underperformance (Bajaj et al., 2017; Bunar, 2019; Isik-Ercan, 2012; Li, 2013; Li & Qin, 2024; Roxas, 2011). These assumptions also infuse studies calling for teachers and school leaders to support the inclusion of refugee students by fostering a culture of warmth, making use of culturally and linguistically affirming curricula, and facilitating their participation in extracurricular activities (Bajaj & Bartlett, 2017; García & Sylvan, 2011; Mendenhall & Bartlett, 2018).

Although this scholarship draws attention to the importance of teacher preparation and resources in combating the marginalization of refugee students, it neither centers refugee students’ perspectives nor emphasizes their intellectual potential or community cultural wealth (Massing, 2025; Yosso, 2005). Nor does it take refugee parents seriously as potentially effective partners in their children's education. Instead, the few studies that do center refugee parents focus on the barriers, including prohibitive work schedules, the lack of transportation and translation services, and educator biases that impede refugee parents’ school engagement (Al & Akay, 2025; Isik-Ercan, 2018; Koyama & Bakuza, 2017; Li, 2013) and frame them as needing assistance and encouragement to become involved at school (Snell, 2018, p. 131). While these studies provide important context, they also often implicitly characterize refugee parents as passive or reactive or indifferent, echoing infantilizing representations of refugees as childlike recipients of aid and benevolence that have long circulated in American scholarship and popular culture (Casavantes Bradford, 2022; Espiritu, 2014).

This paper challenges these characterizations of refugee students and their parents. Building on the few available studies of successful refugee parent engagement (Bergset, 2017; Zaidi, 2021), we advance a new interpretation of refugee students and parents as possessing an in-depth ecological understanding (Hamilton & Moore, 2004) of the academic, social, and cultural challenges refugee students encounter in urban public schools, and as competent agents of educational change. In doing so, we enter into conversation with scholars who examine efforts by racialized and marginalized parents to improve urban schools as well as the contexts and conditions that facilitate or impede school–parent–community collaborations.

Facilitating Refugee Student and Parent Engagement: Contexts and Conditions

The scholarship to date on collaborations between schools, families, and communities reflects the potential and limits inherent in efforts to democratize public schooling. In their study of educational reform in Chicago, Bryk et al. (1998) argue that policies emphasizing local autonomy did produce improved academic outcomes in the city's elementary schools. However, they also found that authentic engagement and shared decision making were more likely to take place in advantaged schools. Supporting these findings, studies have shown that educators in urban schools often lack deep understanding of students and parents who are low income, minoritized, or immigrants; they are also often ill-equipped to engage in authentic two-way dialogue, tending to dominate discussions and otherwise fail to connect with community members (Ishimaru, 2014; Johnson & Pajares, 1996; López et al., 2001; Malen & Ogawa, 1988). Other studies have found that many parents in urban districts lack the basic resources, information, and language skills to engage fully in participatory decision-making processes (Marsh, 2007; Shirley, 1997). A small number of recent studies challenge these findings, presenting case studies of successful Black and Latinx parent participation in urban school reform projects (Budhai & Grant, 2022; Fernández & Scribner, 2018). However, none of these studies focus on refugee parents.

Scholars have also studied the role of state law and local policy in shaping family and parent engagement. Particularly relevant to this paper are studies of California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), passed in 2013 to increase equity-based funding and offered a framework for more democratic school governance. One such study found that sustained LCFF-related funding increases have led to improved academic outcomes and graduation rates, particularly for students from low-income and Black communities (Lafortune, 2019). However, Marsh and Hall (2018) found that most districts limited engagement to surface-level consultations and left decision-making power centralized, with deeper influence occurring primarily in well-resourced, linguistically homogenous communities. Other studies similarly found that participation in the development of LCFF-mandated local control and accountability plans (LCAP) was inaccessible to English learner and low-income parents (Humphrey et al., 2017). Still others argue that LCAP community consultations have failed to create lasting institutional mechanisms for accountability to underserved families (Koppich et al., 2018; Gross & Jochim, 2024). Although these studies offer important insights, none specifically discusses the role of refugee students or parents in LCAP discussions.

The Role of Community-Based Organizations

Refugees are equally underrepresented in the literature studying the rapid proliferation since the 1990s of civic associations, coalitions, and community-based organizations that empower parents from marginalized communities to support their children's school success, develop leadership capacity and hold educators and schools accountable (Conchas & Goyette, 2019; Fung, 2001; Ishimaru, 2014; Lerner, 2011; Schutz, 2006; Shirley, 2009). Studies have nonetheless linked low income and minoritized parent participation in CBOs with positive educational outcomes. Lawson and Alameda-Lawson (2012) found that undocumented Latina mothers who participated in a community-based organization developed new forms of social capital that allowed them to better support their children as learners. Shirley (2009) similarly found that parent participation in community organizing led to increased parent engagement and improved trust between school teachers and leaders and community members (pp. 233–34). More recent studies have framed community-based organizations as an important resource for school leaders struggling to promote student success in resource-constrained urban districts (Cano-Hila & Sánchez-Martí, 2022; Gil & Johnson, 2024). However, most of these studies focus on CBOs that serve a single cultural or linguistic community, and none to date focuses on refugee parents.

As a result, and despite recent calls for educators to do more to foster the engagement and empowerment of immigrant and refugee students and parents (Hong & da Silva Iddings, 2022), we still know very little about community-based organizations like the PSRO that bring together stakeholders from different racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. We know even less about how they do so. Scholars have highlighted the importance of the intergenerational, feminist, and cultural humility-informed practices ² the PSRO relies on in other contexts; for example, a recent study analyzed the role of bi-directional intergenerational learning in catalyzing and supporting community organizing efforts by Latinx immigrant parents (Rujosa, 2022). Others have emphasized how feminist/muxerista organizing methods, including practices of care, community building, and relational work, empower Latinx mothers’ efforts to support their children's learning and improve urban schools (Fernández & Scribner, 2018; Nygreen, 2017; Pesquera & Segura, 1997). None of these studies, however, centers refugees. As for the concept of cultural humility, a set of values and practices social work practitioners have identified as essential to fostering mutually empowering cross-cultural communities and self-reflexive, power-sensitive solidarities (Fisher-Borne et al., 2015; Greene, 2023; Ortega & Faller, 2011) the few educational studies that employ the concept focus on teacher and curricular development (Abdou et al., 2022; Haynes-Mendez & Engelsmeier, 2020; Lund & Lee, 2015). No study to date examines the role of cultural humility-informed practices within cross-cultural community organizing efforts to improve urban schools.

Data Collection Context

The PSRO was established in 2012 under the auspices of Social Advocates for Youth (SAY) San Diego, a nonprofit social services agency that operates the Crawford Community Connections (CCC). Established in 1990, the CCC serves all students and families in Mid-City San Diego as a school-based family resource center located on the Crawford High School campus—a refugee-serving urban school where more than 20 languages are spoken, and where a significant percentage of students’ parents are illiterate in either or both English and their home languages (San Diego Unified School District, n.d.b; StoryCorps, 2025).

The PSRO initially focused on educating its members to develop recommendations for San Diego Unified School District's first Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) in 2013. It quickly developed a base in City Heights' East African and Myanmar/Burma communities, and over time, with the neighborhoods’ Latinx parents. Since its founding, the PSRO has organized and trained more than 1,200 of the neighborhood's refugee and immigrant students and parents to articulate their demands for educational justice (Oswald & Global Action Research Center, 2019).

Although the LCFF requires robust community engagement, it does not fund, nor does it not obligate school districts to directly grant LCFF funds, to community-based organizations (California Department of Education, n.d.). Seed funding for the PSRO was provided by the California Endowment, which awarded SAY San Diego a $150,000 grant through its Healthy Children & Families Initiative in 2012 to support leadership development and advocacy training for school and health equity (The California Endowment, 2012). The San Diego Unified School District also provides in-kind infrastructure and staffing to support CCC and, by extension, the PSRO. However, until 2023, SAY San Diego acted as the PSRO's fiscal agent, strategically reallocating its existing resources to sustain operation. In 2023, the PSRO was relocated under the auspices of San Diego Global Arc, a City Heights-based nonprofit organization that advocates for solutions to local and global problems emerging from poverty, environmental degradation, and unhealthy living conditions (The Global Arc, n.d.). Most PSRO activities nonetheless continue to take place at or around Crawford High School.

It is important to note that since 2016, the PSRO has survived a global pandemic while operating in a political and social context that is increasingly hostile to refugees. Their efforts have spanned the election and re-election of Donald Trump, whose two administrations have implemented a wide range of policies that have reduced refugee admissions by more than 90%, defunded refugee resettlement, apprehended and deported tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants, and gutted K-12 and higher education DEI initiatives (Mirnoff, 2025; Preston, 2016; Shaw, 2025). Compounding the upheaval these policies have produced, in January 2025, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded the longstanding policy that schools be treated as “sensitive locations” where immigration enforcement would be avoided (Arundel, 2025). In San Diego, as in other school districts across the country, these actions have created a climate of hostility and fear that impacts refugee and immigrant students’ school attendance and otherwise exacerbates educational outcome disparities (Dee, 2025; McConnell & Hubbard, 2025). They also cast into dramatic relief the importance of the work performed by community-based organizations like the PSRO to create safe spaces for refugee students and parents to come together to support one another and advocate for their children's educational needs.

Researcher Positionality

The positionality of the three members of our research team—two full professors, one in Chicanx/Latinx studies and history and the other in ethnic studies, and one PhD candidate in ethnic studies—is informed by our experiences as interdisciplinary critical refugee studies scholars, educators, and women of color. As refugees and children of involuntary migrants, our perspectives are shaped by personal and familial experiences of displacement, resettlement, linguistic and cultural dislocation, and educational struggles and adaptation. We each also have years (or decades) of experience working and conducting research with refugees and involuntary migrants from multiple communities. In these interactions, we have been guided by insights from the fields of critical refugee studies, ethnic and cultural studies, feminisms of color, and critical pedagogies (Anzaldúa, 1987; Collins, 1986; Delgado-Bernal, 1998; Hernández-Avila, 1995; Hooks, 1989), that call for scholars to prioritize the voces perdidas (Salinas, 2017) of marginalized people—including refugees, non-white immigrants, and people of color—in their research.

Study Design

Our study design combined intensive participant observation and in-depth semi-structured interviews, conducted between January and December 2023, in order to generate thick description (Fine, 2003) of PSRO members engaged in a transformative process of social interactions with one another and with teachers and school and district leaders (Brown-Saracino et al., 2010, p. 547). Consistent with our commitment to centering refugee voices, the heart of this study is the parent interviews. However, we also conducted interviews with PSRO and district leaders. We also gathered documentary evidence of program activities and outcomes, including PSRO and school district memos and reports as well as articles from local news sources, to ensure that we considered multiple perspectives and sources of evidence in answering our research questions (Merriam, 2009).

Data Collection

Following institutional review board approval, we began collecting data in January 2023.

This progressed in three overlapping stages. In the first stage, we began participant observation of an entire cycle of the PSRO's annual activities. This included attending regularly scheduled general events, workshops, and language-based community meetings; interacting with teachers and administrators at school sites and the San Diego Unified District offices; and participating in the preparations for the PSRO's December Community Dialogue, the culminating activity of yearlong efforts to elicit students' and parents’ ideas for inclusion in the LCAP. While participating in these events, we observed and documented how the PSRO's values and organizing approaches are reflected in its daily operations, interactions between its members, and in the group's relations with teachers and leaders at school and district sites. We also engaged in informal conversations with leaders and members of the PSRO, teachers, and school district officials. Each member of our research team took extensive field notes describing these meetings and events, which we added to the project's Google Drive and discussed at biweekly meetings.

Simultaneously, in January and February 2023, we began our interviews. The first round was conducted with the Director of CCC, the PSRO and Global ARC's leaders, and a professional staff member (n = 4). These in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in English, in person, at Crawford High School or via one-on-one recorded Zoom calls. Two of these interviewees—the director of CCC and the professional staff member—were Spanish-speaking Latinas. The director of Global ARC is a white English-speaking man; at the time of the study, the director of the PSRO was a multilingual Kenyan-American immigrant man. Interview length varied from 50 to 90 min. These interviews were designed to deepen our understanding of the PSRO's origins, how it has evolved over time, and its major achievements.

Beginning in March 2023, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with refugee student and parent members of the PSRO (n = 21). To ensure broad representation of the PSRO's principal language-based communities, we conducted interviews with one Filipino parent; two from the Haitian community; two from the Arabic community; three from the Somali community; four from the Karen and Burmese communities; four from the Kiswahili speaking community; and five Spanish-speaking parents. We recruited interviewees by issuing an email call for participation through the PSRO, translated into each of the community's preferred languages, explaining the study and inviting volunteers. We also attended language-based meetings, where we introduced ourselves via translator and invited parents to participate. CCC also circulated the call for interviewees. Seventeen of our 21 interviews were with women; the other four were men. Nineteen had children attending or who had attended SDUSD schools. Interviews were conducted in person at the CCC center or via one-on-one recorded Zoom calls. Interview length varied from 50 to 90 min. Interviewees received 75.00 in compensation, and we provided childcare as needed.

Although they followed a semi-structured interview protocol, we designed these interviews as an exercise in narrative inquiry, a cross-disciplinary research methodology that emphasizes the importance of oral narrative research in uncovering the stories of marginalized subjects (Delgado, 1995; Delgado-Bernal, 1998; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). With this in mind, we began by exchanging greetings and telling study participants about our own and our children's education. After re-summarizing the study's purpose, securing informed consent for their participation and permission to record our conversations, and gathering basic demographic data, we then asked parents to tell us about their children and their educational journeys. By doing so, we deliberately made space for parents to frame their own narratives before moving on to the questions included in our semi-structured interview guide.

The interview guide included nine open-ended questions, including What challenges have your children faced in achieving success and well-being in school? How has being in the PSRO helped you to make your children's educational needs known to the school? And: In your opinion, what are the PSRO's most important achievements? We invited participants to reflect on how they understood the PSRO's intergenerational, feminist, and cultural humility-informed approaches and the extent to which they saw it reflected in the organization's work. Consistent with the theoretical and ethical underpinnings of narrative inquiry, at the end of each interview, participants were given the opportunity to qualify previous comments or add anything they felt was important to their narrative.

Interviews were conducted in seven languages. We drew upon our own heritage languages to conduct interviews in English and Spanish; when we did not share a language with an interviewee, or they preferred to be interviewed in their home language, we made use of translators, drawing from the pool of translators the PSRO employs for whole-group meetings and interactions at school and district sites. In some cases, translations were conducted by members of the PSRO who were competent but not fluent English speakers. Recognizing that in some cases interviewees’ intended meanings may not have been fully conveyed in translation, we listened closely to interview participants’ pacing, intonation, and affect to identify moments when participants may have been struggling to communicate. In those moments, we sought to fill in gaps or clarify ambiguities by rephrasing questions or summarizing and asking for confirmation. We also relied on funds of cultural intuition (Delgado-Bernal, 1998; Malagón et al., 2009), including our own struggles to communicate in second and third languages, to frame follow-up prompts that recognized the experiences and perspectives of interview participants and encouraged rapport and trust. Throughout the interview process, we chose to be consciously guided by the PSRO's cultural humility approach, which does not view the fact that no member speaks all of the organization's languages as an insurmountable barrier to communication. Instead, it understands PSRO members’ shared struggle to communicate across language differences as a powerful basis for crafting a collective identity and sense of solidarity.

Finally, to ensure we had a comprehensive understanding of the PSRO's work, we conducted interviews with San Diego Unified School District leaders during summer 2023 (n = 4). Interviewees included the SDUSD Deputy Superintendent (a white American man), the district's Family Engagement Program Manager (a black American woman), and the two district trustees (both Latinx and Spanish speaking) elected to represent the Crawford and Hoover Cluster communities. Held over Zoom, these one-on-one recorded interviews were conducted in English and ranged from 20 to 30 min each. Interviews were designed to elicit additional context on the PSRO's emergence and evolution over time, its relationships and interactions with the district, and district leaders’ perceptions of the PSRO's organizational approach and accomplishments.

Data Analysis

During our year of fieldwork, we met twice monthly to discuss fieldnotes and reconcile our distinct perspectives on what we had observed. Beginning in Summer 2023, we transcribed our interviews, completing this process by February 2024. During research meetings, we read and compared interview transcripts with one another and with our interview and field notes, engaging in a self-reflexive process of “unpacking” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 81; Malagón et al., 2009) to identify repeated narratives and concepts and similar or divergent experiences, taking extra time to interpret the transcripts of interviews conducted via translator. Guided by narrative inquiry's focus on participants’ entire narrative, rather than on the highlighting of specific words or phrases as the unit of analysis, we addressed areas of ambiguity by considering them in light of the rest of the interview. When our own assumptions or biases led to different interpretations, we reviewed relevant fieldnotes and PSRO and Global ARC documents for clarification, then returned to the transcripts, seeking to interpret refugee students and parents’ narratives within the context of their individual lived experience (Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 57) as well as in light of the PSRO's trajectory and changing social and political contexts.

Because most of our parent interviewees could neither speak nor read English, we did not provide them with transcripts for accuracy checks. We nonetheless conducted informal oral participant checks by consulting participants in person for clarifications and soliciting additional context from PSRO and school leaders. We also cross-referenced parents’ interviews with one another and with information contained in PSRO and Global ARC documents.

A few words about this study's limitations are in order. Although we made every effort to interview PSRO members of different races, ethnicities, gender, national origins, and language groups, our sample size is a small one. Any study based on a small sample size and on a series of single 1-hr interviews will necessarily be incomplete and selective. We also recognize that interviews conducted via translator, even when they are highly trained and equally fluent in both languages, present a range of obstacles to understanding. Our awareness of these limitations motivated us to take special care in interpreting our interviews within the context provided by other sources of evidence. We are thus confident that our findings faithfully articulate the perspectives of the refugee students and parents at the heart of this study.

Parents’ Motives for Joining the PSRO

Our data suggests that the majority of our interviewees were motivated to join the PSRO because of their children's academic struggles and the perceived indifference of teachers and school leaders. Many parents emphasized their desire for their children to succeed in school and attend college or university. They also saw their children's education as crucial to achieving security and socioeconomic mobility for the entire family—in the words of one parent, as “the ladder to get out of poverty” (F. Contreras, personal communication, July 25, 2023). However, almost all interviewees reported that children's limited English made it hard for them to learn across subjects. Many also reported they had not been informed of their children's lack of progress until it was too late to effectively intervene. One mother shared that two of her children were informed months before the end of their senior year that they’d failed to meet graduation requirements—but the school had never notified her they were in danger of not graduating. Not wanting her younger children to experience the same thing, she joined the PSRO. Another mother similarly reported that she, like many other mothers, was motivated to join “because we see that our children don't get the education they deserve” (D. Alvarez, personal communication, July 25, 2023).

The PSRO's membership grew dramatically in 2016, when the San Diego Unified School District deciding to close its New Arrivals Centers (NAC) for non-English speaking refugee and immigrant students without consulting families. During the previous decade, refugee students attending San Diego schools spent their first year in NAC classrooms, where they studied their core subjects with other non-English speakers and remained with the same teacher throughout the day. However, in 2016, refugee and immigrant families were informed that their children would be placed immediately in mainstream classrooms (Drake, 2016). Families and community members turned to the PSRO in order to communicate their anger and distress to the district. As one mother recalled,

…parents and community members [in PSRO] went from this small core group to a really large group quickly, because folks were immediately impacted by the idea that the New Arrival Centers were going to be going away… Tensions were really rising between the community and district leadership and the decision makers: Why were they changing the structure of the new arrival centers at the time, and without consulting us? (L. Gonzales, personal communication, April 25, 2023)

Other parents reported being drawn to the PSRO through personal outreach from the organization's leader. A Kenyan immigrant with a long record of educational advocacy in City Heights, Dan Nyamangah had an M.Ed with a focus on community development and extensive experience in community organizing in his home country. He also spoke Swahili, a language used by many East African refugee families in the Crawford and Hoover cluster. Nyamangah's embeddedness in the community, his cross-cultural and linguistic skills, and his affability and humility generated trust and goodwill and motivated many parents to join. A smaller number of parents reported that participating in school events brought them into contact with the PSRO. One Spanish-speaking mother encountered the organization while volunteering at her son's school. After, “they began to invite me [to attend meetings], and I began to see this group as a way to support parents to advocate for their children” (D.A. Mendoza, personal communication, July 25, 2023).

The Power of Intergenerational Organizing

Refugee youth also played a crucial role in intergenerational organizing efforts that attracted many PSRO members. Youth were among the PSRO's founders, and its first years, it relied heavily on a group of 10 students who the organization's director described as a “foundational part of the organization.” Bilingual and skilled at serving as translators for their parents, these refugee students became involved because they wanted better educational experiences for their younger siblings; they also wanted their parents to have a voice in decision-making processes at their schools. According to Nyanmangah, the students “played a key role in bringing in their parents. They were the ones leading, but they needed their parents to be the voice. The students encouraged parents to see the importance of their participation” (D. Nyanmangah, personal communication, April 12, 2023).

Other youth leaders of the PSRO included a group of East African refugee youth that had failed the California State High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) (Oswald & Global Action Research Center, 2019). In 2011, about 20 of these students had started meeting weekly to discuss their school's failure to prepare them for the test, to include non-English-speaking parents in decision-making, and to offer a safe and healthy school environment (F. Musa, personal communication, December 6, 2023). These young people also played a crucial role in recruiting parents and community elders to the new organization.

Between 2012 and 2015, refugee youth also taught PSRO parents how to read and interpret school communications, including report cards, standardized test scores and progress notes; they then taught other parents how to do the same (Oswald & Global Action Research Center, 2015). They also engage in dialogue with parents and community members during the organization's annual Community Dialogue. Leveraging their familiarity with U.S. culture and school processes, the PSRO's youth leaders have thus helped to foster intergenerational collaboration, build their parents’ capacity to serve as educational advocates, and facilitated the building of social capital between refugee parents from different linguistic communities.

PSRO parents are aware of the value of their children's experiences and the importance of students’ input. As one PSRO stated:

…many things that we as parents do not see, [the] young people see; they write [them] down and explain them so that we understand them … sometimes we as adults want what we think to be said or done, but sometimes it's more important to listen to them and know how they think, what they look at, and take them into account … it has left a very good taste in my mouth to be participating there, because [I have learned] how to listen to how young people think. (M. Arias, personal communication, July 25, 2023)

Feminist Community Organizing

Feminist organizing strategies, including practices of reciprocity, mutual recognition and care, and the elevation of women's leadership, have also played a critical role in the PSRO's growth. The organization's director has played a central role in establishing these feminist practices by building close and caring relationships with students and parents, and through accompanying community members beyond PSRO activities. A PSRO member described a time where she asked Nyamangah to join a meeting at her youngest child's elementary school to help make the case for a new program:

I even invited Mr. Dan to participate at a SSI [school site] meeting. Yes, a school program, and he was there, sitting with part of the board of directors! And yes, he supported us…. (D. Álvarez Mendoza, personal communication, July 25, 2023)

Nyamangah continued attending school site meetings with this parent for a year, helping her and other non-PSRO parents advocate for their children. Over the years, similar practices of reciprocity, mutual recognition and care drew new members to the organization. Another parent stated that it was precisely this approach to organizing that drew her to the PSRO, emphasizing “they don't want to leave anyone behind” (J. Valsaint, personal communication, July 25, 2023).

The PSRO also fosters and encourages leadership among the refugee women who have been essential to the organization's development. Although fathers and male community members are represented in the PSRO, women are the majority and the most consistent attendees of its meetings; at the December 2023 Community Dialogue, approximately 90% of those in attendance were female (Author, field notes, 2023). Women also speak confidently and often at PSRO meetings, and are publicly recognized by the director and other members for their leadership and labor (Author, field notes, 2023). Female PSRO members also regularly perform outreach, inviting friends and neighbors to attend PSRO events and arranging transportation.

In order to facilitate women's participation, the PSRO regularly provides childcare, meals, and transportation to its meetings. Many interviewees reported that this sensitivity to women and mother's needs facilitated their participation. Some female members nonetheless reported struggling to balance their participation with other responsibilities to their spouses and children, or shared that economic or health problems prevented them from being as involved as they would like (Author, field notes, 2023). We nonetheless witnessed women's extraordinary efforts to remain active in the PSRO. As but one example, during meetings held via Zoom, we observed mothers following the discussion while cooking dinner and caring for children (Author, field notes, 2023).

Cultural Humility and Community Organizing

The PSRO's cultural humility-informed organizing model deliberately fosters an environment in which diverse refugee parents and students enjoy equal opportunities to share their ideas and concerns and collectively seek solutions with teachers and school and district leaders. Although few interviewees recognized the term “cultural humility,” their narratives suggest that its practices are deeply embedded in the organization's operations and in members’ interactions.

The values of cultural humility drive the PSRO's approach to facilitating communication between members who speak different languages. All of the PSRO's large group events, including meetings with district, school and community leaders, parent education and college preparation workshops, and potluck socials and celebrations, are supported by interpreters. This allows members from different linguistic communities to interact and to understand and contribute to discussions. This isn’t a perfect solution—because of the need for multiple translations, meetings often run long, and the transmission of information through informal translators can be uneven (Author field notes, 2023). But robust attendance at large events as well as parent interviews confirm that it works.

Larger events alternate with smaller monthly language-based group meetings, and concerns, questions and insights arising from those meetings are reported to the PSRO's leaders and incorporated in organization-wide conversations and initiatives. They also use this process to gather student and parent perspectives to share with school and district leaders at the annual Community Dialogue. The daughter of one PSRO member reported that the smaller language-based meetings made her mother feel included, because she could express herself there in her own language, she knew she would have the opportunity to speak and be heard. The same interviewee noted the challenges of communication at large group meetings, where in some cases, no two parents in attendance spoke the same language fluently. However, they also emphasized that PSRO members still managed to come together across linguistic boundaries to discuss their children's educational needs and generate ideas for how to support them. (Nshimirimana, personal communication, August 28, 2023).

Cultural humility was also evident at the December 2023 Community Dialogue. Notwithstanding members’ diverse cultures and traditions, and their different perspectives and objectives, we found that PSRO members consistently listened to and affirmed one another. They also supported each other in advocating for accommodations based on students’ distinct cultural and religious traditions. Cultural humility also informed PSRO leaders’ ongoing efforts to strengthen relationships between community members, schools, and the district. These relationships were developed through informal interactions at the organization's large multilingual events, during which the organization's director and English-speaking members made a point of introducing other members to teachers, administrators, and district officials, serving as needed interpreters to facilitate conversations.

Despite occasional tensions around questions of communication, exacerbated as the group has become more diverse in recent years, interviewees consistently emphasized the PSRO's ability to unite people across racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines. As one member eloquently stated:

Going to those meetings you will realize that the Spanish communities, the Cambodian, Somalian people, from El Salvador, from all over the world are in San Diego … combined all together, we will see the challenges are not that different. Or the needs. So PSRO comes with diversity, and makes everyone sit together; and we can realize what is going on, what is best and how to process and move forward so our children can be more successful in the future. And also, we learn from each other a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot! (J. Valsaint, personal communication, July 25, 20203)

Refugee Students and Parents as Catalysts of Change in Urban Schools

We find a strong relationship between participation in the PSRO and a range of positive educational outcomes. First, our data suggests that joining the PSRO has given many parents a newfound confidence in their ability to engage directly with educators and provides logistical support to empower them to advocate for their children's academic success and well-being. Many parents reported that before becoming involved with the PSRO, they were afraid to bring questions or concerns directly to their children's teachers. But knowing that they had the PSRO's support changed that. As one member noted, “if I know my kids need something, I will ask … [the PSRO] encourages me to advocate for my kids” (Karen-Burmese Focus Group, personal communication, August 29, 2023). With their assistance, this parent scheduled monthly meetings with their child's school counselor to monitor (with the support of an interpreter) their academic progress. Another parent reported that when she learned her son was not on track to graduate at the start of his senior year, the PSRO helped her meet with his teachers to request accommodations he needed to graduate.

The PSRO has also empowered many parents to forge a new relationship with school and district leaders. As one member reported, the PSRO taught members to “speak for ourselves. To say to the politician or to the school principal, to the teacher, look, I need this, I want this…” (F. Contreras, personal communication, July 25, 2023). Another reflected:

When we come to this country we think that we don't have the right, that what they give us is the maximum and that we can't demand anything. And I think that the fact that we have participated in PSRO has opened our eyes a lot and that is that we can do other things…. We have learned how to ask, how to negotiate, what our rights are and that opportunities are for everyone. (M. Arias, personal communication, July 25, 2023)

Parents’ increased efficacy and engagement is also evident in the growth over time of the PSRO's annual Community Dialogue—and the attendance of school and district leaders at that event. In its first year, although school leaders and district officials were invited, no administrators attended. However, by the time the third dialogue was held in 2020, the district had become involved in its planning, and all Hoover/Crawford principals and two area superintendents participated. Since then, the Community Dialogue has become the primary space where the superintendent and the community communicate directly with each other. As one parent remembered, “at first, the district didn't take us so seriously. It is an achievement that … they listened to us and that they have come to the meeting every year. They know that if they don't participate, we'll be in their offices” (M. Arias, personal communication, July 25, 2023). By 2017, the Annual Dialogue had become such a visible and robust vehicle for parent engagement that the PSRO had become the only community-based organization explicitly acknowledged in the “stakeholder feedback” section of SDUSD's 2018–2019 LCAP (Reid, 2018).

Through its advocacy, the PSRO has catalyzed the adoption of a number of refugee-serving policies and programs in Crawford and Hoover cluster schools. Among these were the provision of Halal meals for Muslim students; another was the provision of translation and interpretation services in Karen, Kisigua, Somali, and Swahili. As a Karen-speaking parent related:

In the past when I attended the meeting, there's no interpreter. You do not understand what's going on, and nobody even asks you if you need translation. But through PSRO, we had a conversation with Dan and we requested for an interpreter and then advocated for that. And now when we go to meet with the principal, they provide interpreters to us.

The PSRO also successfully used the LCAP consultation process to press the district to change its “Language Other than English” graduation requirement. In response, SDUSD developed tests for 14 new languages so that refugee and immigrant students could meet the additional language requirement by demonstrating proficiency on an exam in their native language. This reform relieved pressure on refugee students who had previously been forced to take additional foreign language classes while learning English—even when they already spoke multiple additional languages. PSRO advocacy also prompted the district to form a committee to examine best practices for students with interrupted formal education (SIFE) and modify its enrolment processes to better identify students eligible for SIFE resources, and to provide space, interpreters, and childcare for community meetings. Through all of these accomplishments, the PSRO has contributed in significant ways to creating safer, more nurturing, and culturally responsive learning environments for refugee students in San Diego public schools.