WESTBROOK – “Zero, one, two, three,” the class says cautiously in unison, following Shelley Goad’s lead. Enoque Makeng Diampa shouts out five.
“‘Four! You always skip that one,” Goad says with a laugh.
Goad teaches a literacy-level adult English class at the Westbrook Community Center; that means her students come in with no English knowledge at all. They hail from Cambodia, Laos, Angola and other nations. Their native languages include French, Portuguese, Lingala, Cambodian and Thai.
Goad knows a little bit of high school French, but when it comes to communicating with students, she does it with a mix of hand gestures, Google Translate and personal connection.
“I try to learn a little bit about each of them,” she said. “To connect.”
Goad’s 10 students are among the 322 taking adult English classes through Westbrook’s Adult Education program this fall, and thousands of others in the greater Portland region are in line to take the courses. Many are asylum seekers from Africa, who arrived by the thousands in Maine over the past few years, fleeing conflict and persecution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola.
Adult education is offered through public school districts across the state. There are more than 70 centers in Maine, which usually offer courses in academics (language arts and math), workforce training (welding and certified nursing) and enrichment (weaving and photography). Most are free.
English for Speakers of Other Languages, or ESOL, courses are common across adult ed centers. Students are assessed and placed into a level based on their starting proficiency. But the number of multilingual speakers in the region has been rising, and many adult ed programs say they just don’t have more space in their classes.
Portland and Lewiston have seen such high demand that they started sending students to Westbrook. Then Westbrook got so busy it has had to pass some on to Gorham.
EARLY LANGUAGE NEEDS
Westbrook offers English classes from basic literacy through level six. Right now, intermediate courses for levels three and four have the greatest demand, according to Westbrook English Language Learning Coordinator Shila Cook.
“Three and four tends to be where students learning a new language, in our case English, get kind of stuck,” Cook said. “That’s the big turning point between the phrases a tourist would learn to get around, to having fluid conversation.”
In two years, demand for English classes in the community has more than doubled. In fiscal year 2022, Westbrook enrolled 176 students. By 2024, that number was 476.
“Westbrook as a community has been slowly growing, and has grown at a faster pace lately,” said Director Jennifer Mull-Brooks. She said the school district has seen major growth in the number of multilingual students. “We’re growing at the same pace. As the K-12 schools grow, we generally get the parents of those students.”
Mull-Brooks said students range from ages 17 to 70, with some families and couples coming to classes together.
Many Westbrook adult ed students are individuals who receive General Assistance, a program run by Maine municipalities that provides money so people who cannot financially support themselves are able to pay for basic needs. The municipality can require recipients to participate in education or workforce training, which can include English classes for those who aren’t proficient.
Some students are also professionals who worked as teachers or doctors in their home countries, but their skills didn’t transfer to the U.S.
“Just picture yourself going to another country and being used to being able to take care of yourself, take care of your own children, take care of all of your own business, and then you just can’t. And you don’t even speak the language to be able to try,” Mull-Brooks said. “So that’s what most of our students are coming to us with.”
TRANSPORTATION CHALLENGES
As the largest adult ed program in Maine, Portland is a magnet for adult English courses for the whole region. It’s also at the center of Maine’s migrant community. That has led to a demand that vastly eclipses what the district can offer.
So far this year, Portland has enrolled about 1,300 students in its English courses. But there are at least 1,000 people on the waitlist — and director Abbie Yamamoto said that’s just where they stopped counting.
“We’ve always had a constant demand,” she said. “But it’s gone above and beyond our capacity since a couple of years ago when the number of asylum seekers arriving just ballooned.”
Portland offers 45 English classes over six levels. Yamamoto said they tried to increase capacity by adding remote classes, but the waitlist is still vast. The school even has a waitlist manager, who makes sure students are placed as efficiently and quickly as possible and has begun redirecting students to nearby adult ed programs in places like Westbrook and South Portland when they have availability. Yamamoto said the district will also rearrange instructors to different levels to match needs.
Portland’s waitlist manager can help make referrals, but limits like transportation and local awareness are still a barrier.
“There should be no reason why we have under 10 people in a class when people are (on a waitlist.) I think that is something we need to figure out is, what’s the pipeline?” Gorham’s adult ed director Bridget Kahn said.
Gorham offers two of its four ESOL courses at the First Parish Congregational Church on Main Street because of its proximity to transitional housing for migrants and to the bus stop.
Their relatively new program isn’t full like its neighbors, but it is growing. Last year, there were 14 English students. This year there are 22. Kahn said students come from a couple of communities, and Gorham offers a remote option too.
Kahn used to work at Portland adult ed, but said she moved to Gorham because she saw the need for a more regional outlook on adult education.
“It just seems that we need to think about our English programming and workforce programming more as a regional effort versus program-by-program,” she said. “Sharing resources, making sure that students can move through programs and programs seamlessly.”
Yamamoto, from Portland, said other options for English classes, like those offered by nonprofits In Her Presence, the Salvation Army and the Portland Immigrant Welcome Center, are an important part of relieving the burden in the city.
But when it comes to collaborating with nearby communities, transportation and access can be prohibitive.
“A lot of the people who are coming in, who have a more beginning level English need, that usually means they haven’t been here very long and a lot of their life infrastructure is not set up yet, and that includes transportation,” Yamamoto said. “So being accessible by public transportation is really important.”
COLLABORATIVE SOLUTIONS
Yamamoto also sees workforce partnerships as an important solution. If employers can offer on-site English classes, it frees up space for more students in traditional classrooms. If they can pay employees for their time in English classes, that’s even better.
“It would be great if there were employer partners who would start doing on-site classes, but with the understanding that this helps not just themselves, but it’s kind of a general investment in society,” she said. “The more you’re able to work with your employees transparently and help them develop in whatever areas that they need to as a professional development opportunity, that investment comes back.”
Westbrook has a partnership like this with the Luke’s Lobster packing plant in Saco. Two years ago, about 80% of the facility’s employees were migrants. Cook and Mull-Brooks said that after some growing pains, the school has figured out how to meet employees where they’re at as much as possible by installing computers in the breakroom with learning software, equipping students with laptops and partnering with an app that students can use to practice on their phones.
The program is funded by a grant that allows employees to gain financial incentives and career mobility as they progress in learning, and lets their spouses to participate. Classes are drop in, accommodating shifts in the work day and the lobster season.
“So it’s about figuring out exactly how to make it so that no matter where or when a student is working, that they can still access classes,” Cook said.