On a spring day at Seneca High School, all eyes were on the basketball court.
The Seneca Hispanic Student Union shimmied and salsaed while a crowd of teenagers in saris, abayas, colorful African prints, jeans and t-shirts clapped along to the beat from the sidelines.
Maihan Torres choreographed the HSU’s dance. Torres came to Louisville from Colombia in the summer of 2021. By April 2024, she was a high school senior at Seneca — where 1 in 4 students have ties to other countries — and president of the school’s HSU.
“We are here in the United States also — we are a part of the United States,” Torres said. “We want [other students] to know about us and share everything — we are something,” Torres told KyCIR.
Torres is among nearly 20,000 “multilingual learners” in Jefferson County Public Schools whose first language is not English. Students designated multilingual, or “ML” for short, are entitled to extra support to build English fluency. In years past, JCPS and most other school districts have referred to these students as English as a Second Language (ESL) students or English Language Learners (ELL).
The multilingual population of JCPS is growing fast — 80% in the last five years. Today, JCPS officials say about 20% of JCPS students are multilingual. More than half of them identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Torres and others told KyCIR they feel supported by their school principal and many of their teachers, but that their school community is not always welcoming to immigrant students. On top of a language barrier, multilingual students said they have to navigate racism, xenophobia and insulting assumptions about their intelligence.
“Sometimes we don’t feel like we belong here,” Torres said.
But the HSU is a place where she and other Hispanic and Latino students feel free to be themselves and gain the confidence to proudly share their culture with others.
Since its creation in 2021, the Seneca HSU has grown to more than 100 members. Now, the group is working to make the entire district more welcoming for students with diverse backgrounds.
Last year, the Seneca HSU reached out to the district’s 22 high schools seeking commitments for each to start their own HSU and participate in a new district-wide organization called Hispanic Students United. They got commitments from 17 schools. Some schools already had their own club for Latino or Hispanic students and agreed to join the district-wide group. Others agreed to find a staff sponsor and get their own organization started.
A JCPS spokesperson said the district’s Diversity, Equity, and Poverty division has secured funding to support one HSU sponsor in each middle and high school. It follows a 2020 district commitment to start a Black Student Union at all JCPS high schools and middle schools as part of a racial equity plan.
“Similar to the success of our Black Student Unions, we expect many more schools to form and embrace HSUs on their campuses,” said Mark Hebert, the district spokesperson. “The HSU initiative is one more significant step towards fostering an inclusive and equitable educational environment for all JCPS students.”
At Seneca, students attribute the HSU’s success, in part, to several recently hired Latino teachers who came to JCPS through a recruitment program in Puerto Rico. HSU members and their faculty sponsors say more Latino teachers are needed. In a district where 17% of students are Latino, just 2% of teachers are Latino.
‘A safe space for us’
Driven by economic hardship, climate change, political instability and violence in their countries of origin, more and more people are immigrating to the United States. They take dangerous sea journeys and survive harrowing treks through jungles and deserts, often enduring assaults and exploitation along the way — all for the hope of a better life in the U.S. Increasingly, immigrants are making Louisville their home. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, Jefferson County’s estimated foreign-born population increased 24% from 2017 to 2022.
Marisol León was Seneca’s attendance clerk back in 2021, when Seneca had around 200 multilingual students, nearly half of whom were Latino.
“I noticed that there was a need just to include the children that were incoming from other countries and are Spanish-speaking kids,” León told KyCIR.
León came to Louisville from Miami, where she was accustomed to being a part of a larger Hispanic community.
“I myself felt out of place, so I figured why not make a safe space for us,” she said.
León, math teacher Ann Méndez and 12 students started the HSU. Naomi Suazo was the group’s first president. She first arrived in Louisville in 2017 as a seventh grader with no English. Like many newly-arrived immigrant students, district officials sent her to Newcomer Academy, a JCPS school with special support for recent immigrants. After a year, JCPS moved Suazo to Westport Middle School, where she said she was one of relatively few multilingual students and felt extremely isolated.
“It was a hard transition,” Suazo said. “I knew one person, so that was my person my whole time there.”
When Suazo started high school at Seneca, the school’s Latino population was already significant: about 20% of Seneca’s 1,300 student body. About half were multilingual learners like Suazo. Suddenly, she had lots of friends with similar backgrounds, and the number of multilingual learners kept growing.
By 2023, the year Suazo graduated, Seneca had 350 multilingual learners, more than half of whom were Latino.
As the multilingual student population grew, so did the HSU. It became an important space where students and staff could find solidarity — and not just Spanish speakers. Students originally from African countries and the Middle East are also members of the HSU.
The solidarity the HSU offers is important to students like Isabela Ávila, who immigrated to Louisville from Cuba in 2022. Even in a school with a strong multilingual community, Ávila and other immigrant students said they still feel isolated from the native-English-speaking majority.
“Sometimes they exclude you just for being an immigrant,” Ávila said.
Ávila said she’s heard classmates laugh when she mispronounces a word or when she doesn’t understand a conversation. She said some teachers refuse to let her use Google Translate to interpret in-class assignments and tests — a frustrating barrier when she only needs to look up a word or two.
Her friend Daniela García, also from Cuba, said her classmates sometimes make hurtful assumptions about her. She recounted a time when a native-English-speaking student expressed surprise that García could quickly complete a math problem.
“They think that we are stupid or dumb just because we don’t speak the language,” García said.
‘I feel special’
In June, at an event space in southwest Louisville, wearing a sleek, sparkling green gown, Ávila welcomed hundreds of students, staff and district officials to the first JCPS Hispanic Students United Gala.
Usually shy, Ávila said the HSU gives students like her a space where they can feel seen, respected, recognized and represented.
Student organizers decided to make the gala quinceañera-themed — a nod to the coming of age ceremony celebrated across many Latin American cultures.
Suazo, the HSU’s first president, was in attendance, having just completed her first year of college at Bellarmine University. Suazo was pleased to see so many Seneca high school staff members, along with two school board members. She said she’s happy to see her community get this level of recognition.
“Definitely there can be more done, all the time. But I think what they’re doing currently — it’s amazing,” Suazo said.
Most of the program was in Spanish, a role reversal for many Seneca High School educators. But they had a QR code that took them to an English translation of every speech.
For the gala, each high school sent one quinceañera or quinceañero as a representative, and through a grant, the HSU paid for each student’s dress, hair and makeup for the celebration. The group won the grant by presenting their idea for the gala during Justice Fest, an annual festival in which students in grades 3-12 present their own solutions to issues in their communities.
Daniela Fernández, 15, represented Southern High School and wore a bright red gown with a cupcake skirt and a giant, shimmering bow.
Quinceañeras can cost tens of thousands of dollars in the U.S. and are out of reach for many immigrant families. Fernández said she didn’t get to have one on her own.
“This is my first time,” Fernández said. “So I feel special.”
