Supporting high school students from the MENA region resettled in the US and Ireland

This mixed-methods study collaborates with numerous school districts and regional refugee resettlement agencies to investigate the mental wellbeing of newcomer high school students. The Study of Adolescent Lives after Migration to America (SALaMA) utilized surveys and interviews to identify stressors and support mechanisms for resettled adolescents in public schools in the United States and Ireland (SALaM Ireland). Scholars, policymakers, and practitioners have increasingly recognized the central role that schools play in supporting these families through the challenges of adjustment. In addition to educating students, safe and inclusive schools can anchor young people in the community, introducing them to peers and adult role models and preparing them to excel in their professional, family, and civic lives. Schools have been shown to contribute not only to student integration, but to the integration of families as well, with parents becoming markedly more involved in their children’s schools over time. However, despite the growing numbers of newcomer students from Arab-majority countries, not enough is known to develop programs and policies that enable schools and their partners to best serve this population. Key findings include: 

• Newcomer students who have reported having witnessed someone else being physically hurt in real life are 5.5 times more likely to face a disciplinary event at school. 
• Newcomer students who have reported facing a drastic change in their family in the last year have significantly lower levels of resilience and perceived school belonging. 
• Students who have reported ever experiencing a life-threatening emergency exhibit greater depressive and anxiety symptoms. 
• Newcomer students who have reported higher levels of school belonging are more resilient, while lower levels of reported school belonging are associated with higher levels of suicide ideation. 
• Students from the MENA region reported significantly worse mental health and wellbeing when compared to the general school population, with Arabic-speaking students more likely to experience higher rates of depression, anxiety, externalising behaviour and lower levels of belonging, hope, resilience, and social support. 
• Teachers who work with refugee and migrant students need specific training to understand how pre-migration experiences affect student learning and integration.
• Effective approaches to supporting these students include: greater provision of language and socioemotional supports to accelerate language learning to help build peer relationships and a sense of school belonging, cultural awareness programmes for both teachers and students, and a trusting and supportive teacher-student bond. 

Language programs can either facilitate or hinder newcomer students' inclusion. While learning English is vital for acclimation, prioritizing it at the expense of heritage languages can worsen academic inequities for MENA-region adolescents and negatively impact their acculturation and well-being. These findings highlight the benefits of treating language as a resource rather than a barrier and emphasize the need for education systems to value and support newcomer students’ unique identities and abilities as tools for thriving.  Learn more about the 5-year SALaMA study, the 4-year SALaM Ireland study, and their partnerships, findings, and practical applications.