In 2019 Evelyn Toriz moved from El Paso, Mexico to Norristown, PA. She came to the country with her young children, her six-year-old Johan and her nine-year-old Angeles. Both her kids started attending local schools in their neighborhood and it didn’t take long for Evelyn to notice a striking difference between education in Mexico and Education in the United States.
You don’t only have children, but you are also an active member of your community. How has your experience with the school district been so far? What are some of the challenges?
When I got here five or six years ago I was living in a different district that I’m currently living on now. It’s located on the other side of the city and when my kids finally started school, because the process took a while, I was very worried because my younger child, Johan didn’t really have a lot of experience with English.
How did you approach the language barrier? Were you able to access any special resources?
I talked to the teacher to warn her about this, but she said the child needed to manage just one language. I noticed that he was falling behind, he couldn’t read and he had a lot of gaps but when I talked to his teacher she would always tell me it was normal. He passed first and second grade, but when he got to third grade I started asking myself how. He couldn’t speak or write in English and everyone outside of school encouraged me to take action outside of school. But I noticed that in that specific district, there were a lot of kids that were falling behind, that were learning to read late.
You mentioned that you moved to a different district, and you live somewhere else now. How has your experience been so far in this new school district? Are there any major differences you notice?
Well, I noticed with my daughter that her behavior got worse in Norristown, but when I moved to Plymouth meeting things changed. It’s a completely different district, the other side of the coin. The first week they started Johan got placed on all the programs I had to beg them to place him last school. They [old school] used to say he didn’t need them, but during the first week at the new school, they asked me to sign permission to enroll him in the programs without me even having to ask for it.
How did it make you feel when the school reached out to you to place your child in the special program?
I was incredibly happy because it was something I had been begging for in the last school and they never gave it to me.
What were some key differences in the support your child was given? How did this new program impact him?
Now he had two or three teachers. Some of them support them to speak, others to read, and others to write. It was a very slow process because he didn’t really know English at all.
How did the difference in the quality of education affect your children? What had the biggest influence on them?
It was a complete change. Even the children came to me and begged me to not change them to a different school. They said the teachers were nicer, more comprehensive, and more attentive. I also noticed more communication, all of a sudden I was getting calls and calls, messages and messages from the teachers. I never had that in my old district, there were never calls between the teachers, and they never told me they were concerned about Johan or Angeles. They were just general messages that everyone got. In this district, it’s more personalized.
It is truly nice to work with these teachers, at the other school it was very hard. I didn’t even know how they worked, and even though I was always trying to get involved, I never could. I was always with my children, trying to study with them, but it was really, really hard.
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