AURORA | South African native Roslyn Rudnick has been an English-language teacher for 11 years. She has taught in five different spaces during that time, including in a cramped classroom at 14th and Dayton in the city’s old center for immigrants.
“This is the best setup I’ve had so far,” she said of the bright and roomy Classroom 123 in the new Aurora Welcome Center, a building formerly used by Aurora Public Schools but now a comfortable learning space for immigrants and refugees who come to the city.
Located on the first floor of the APS Educational Services Center 4 on East 11th Avenue and Peoria Street, the welcome center started offering classes such as Rudnick’s in January.
Focus Points Family Resource Center, which offers semester-long ESL classes ranging from beginning to advanced for $30 per semester, shares the space with several nonprofits that include El Centro Humanitario, Rights For All People, Families Forward Resource Center, Colorado African Organization, Global Bhutanese Community Colorado and the Strengthening Neighborhoods Program of the Denver Foundation.
Diana Higuera, who was hired as the Aurora Welcome Center’s new executive director in January, said the center offers ESL and citizenship classes most days of the week. She said she hopes the communal nature of the facility will inspire the nonprofits to collaborate and create new programs as well.
“We do not want to re-create services already in place. We want to partner with people doing great things and fill the gaps,” she said.
She points to amenities that include a hot-spot room that will be rented to organizations serving immigrants and refugees that don’t mind working in a shared office where they will be able to use the center’s Internet and printers.
Higuera’s goals for the new center were echoed by Lizeth Chacon, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Rights for All People. Chacon moved into a more spacious office at the welcome center.
“I think we’re all excited to be collaborating with APS and the city of Aurora,” she said. “We have a huge immigrant and refugee population so we need to make sure we’re not just working to give them the resources that they need, but also working to get them involved and get them to participate in our community. Aurora is such a beautiful city because of its diversity. Finally, we have a center that’s catering to that community.”
Aurora is the most diverse city in Colorado with 105 different ethnic groups living within the city’s borders that each speak their own language. One in five of Aurora’s residents are estimated to have been born in another country, and nearly that number speak English less than very well, according to the 2012 American Community Survey.
The center is near Aurora Central High School, where 10 percent of the students are refugees, according to APS officials. That is reflected in APS schools as well, where the number of students who are refugees has grow from 144 in 2011 to almost 1,000 in 2014.
APS schools in recent years have taken on the role of providing entire families with food, transportation and mental health resources, which is why APS officials said housing the center would be another way to support immigrant and refugee students.
The center serves as a one-stop shop where families can also register for schools at the centralized admissions building located just across the parking lot.
“The Aurora Welcome Center speaks to the commitment of this community to help families successfully transition into Aurora,”Rico Munn, APS superintendent, said in a statement. “Not only is Aurora Public Schools proud to provide the space for the center, but we will continue to support our refugee and immigrant students to be successful in school and learning.”
Back in Rudnick’s classroom, Anberica Garcia, an Aurora resident taking a level-four ESL class, enrolled to improve her pronunciation and grammar, but said she was surprised that she has enjoyed it so much.
“I have been inviting other people to come here and take classes,” she said.