This is not about middle-class Jamaican children who migrate to North America, who generally have a smoother transition into fairly good schools and who, more often than not, do extremely well academically. This is mostly about Jamaican immigrant children of the working poor, like the boy I will call Elroy, his mother Miss Madelyn, and grandmother, Miss Ivy.

Elroy was walking around Reggae New Secondary School yelling, “Good bye everybody; me won’t see unu again; this is me last day a dis ya school ya. Me modda a sen fe me, me a go a New York. Me granny apply fe me bert cerfticket last week.”

This was in May 2005, and the school year at Reggae New Secondary School was not yet over. However, Elroy who was 13 years old and in 8th Grade at that time, should have stayed at Reggae New Secondary School until the end of June in order to get credit for 8th grade. Since Elroy didn’t complete the school year, when he enrolls in school in New York, he will not be able to begin his first year of high school the way he planned.

Elroy’s mother Miss Madelyn, migrated to New York four years ago, leaving Elroy in the care of his grandmother. Her plan was to take two years to “get her feet on the ground, get out his papers, and send for him.”

This is a standard Jamaican emigration story. Elroy, in the mean time, became despondent after two years of waiting to join his mother in New York. Two of his best friends, Tony C. and Mervin, already “went up” to the United States more than a year ago. Four years later, Elroy’s school work had fallen below what he was capable of; he under-performed so much that he was not recommended to take the common entrance examination (CEE), which could have gotten him into a more prestigious, traditional high school.

Even though Elroy attended the less academically challenging and less prestigious school, his performance was still way down.

Because his grandmother submitted an application for his official birth certificate, a preliminary step in a long process to get him to New York to be with his mother and his best friends, Elroy assumed he was migrating in the very near future, so he dropped out of school. By so doing, he failed to complete 8th Grade.

Idle days

Soon after that, Elroy spent his days in idleness, mostly hanging out at malls and plazas, listening to reggae, rap, and hip hop music and playing dominoes on street corners. The knowledge he had acquired up to the 8th Grade began to erode. The structure and discipline that was in place while he attended Reggae New School was also rapidly eroding, and Elroy was fast becoming a teenage educational under-achiever who didn’t have discipline or structure in his life. His grandmother, who had a tenuous hold on him while he was still in school, could not understand what was happening to him. She did not even know Elroy had stopped going to school. As he listened to her constant complaints that his mother needs to take him off her hands because she couldn’t manage him any more and the two years she promised to keep him was long gone, Elroy felt increasingly unwanted and grew more sullen and rebellious.

It was not until May 2007 that Elroy’s documents were finally in place for him to join his mother in New York. What awaited both mother and son in New York was not what either of them had anticipated four years earlier.

When Elroy got to New York, he wasn’t a typical 16-year-old in the 11th Grade. The problem was that he was a 16-year-old in the 8th Grade. He was three years behind, having been out of school for so long.

Furthermore, Miss Madelyn did not attempt to work with Reggae New Secondary School to provide transcripts to Elroy’s new school in New York. Truthfully, the whole process of finally getting her son “up” and getting a home with enough room for both of them pushed the thoughts about school papers out of her mind.

Consequently, because it was fairly easy to get him into a school, she did not expect the kinds of problems that surfaced later about placement. Miss Madelyn wished that the school had just asked about Elroy’s school papers from the beginning to make the whole process a lot easier. His new school wanted him to take all kinds of tests that she had never even heard about. None of this was anything like she had expected. This was a different Elroy from the good, bright boy she left in Jamaica four years ago. She wondered over and over if “dem do something to him.” People can be so jealous.

Becoming increasingly irritated

For his part, Elroy generally understood what was being said to him at school. He was, however, becoming increasingly irritated that they acted “like dem no know a w aim a sey.” The staff claimed to have some experience with immigrant children since they have quite a few from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. According to the staff members, the kids speak a kind of Spanish or, as some of the staff whispered, “Spanglish,” and, of course, there are some Caribbean ones, especially the Jamaicans, who speak something like “Jamerican” or patios, or who knows? The fact was that most of the staff had no idea what the students were saying most of the time. To the staff, a lot of the immigrant students seem somewhat retarded, and their test results prove it.

Elroy finally completed his battery of tests and was diagnosed as developmentally delayed. The fact that he is small in stature lends credence to the diagnosis. Additionally, his long absence from any school or structured learning environment left him with a lack of discipline and self-control.

These behavior problems add to the belief that he is developmentally retarded. He is placed in an alternative learning environment for special needs children and is also provided with a speech therapist and counselor. His inability or unwillingness to submit to a structured learning environment, leads to the recommendation that he be placed on medication since he was also diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

When the final chapter on the life and education of Elroy, the 16-year-old immigrant child who could not wait to “come up” to join his mother, is written, what will it say?

Many think they already know the answer because they have seen it so many times before. Let me tell you that, there is hope way beyond Elroy’s, Miss Madelyn’s, and Miss Ivy’s wildest dreams. With the love and support of his mother, Elroy can gain his confidence back. There is the opportunity for Elroy to start with a part-time, low-paying job and go to evening school to prepare for his GED, the high school equivalency certificate. Afterwards, there is community college, where he can earn post secondary certificate or an associate degree. After that, who can say? This is, after all, the United States, the land of endless opportunities.