Public Schools, and Health Care: A Strategy to Promote Social Inclusion (original) (raw)

Sunset Park Family Support Center brings together adult education and health and social services to provide an integrated one-stop hub for families in southwest Brooklyn. Sunset Park is a diverse, low income, Middle-Eastern, Latino, Eastern European, and Asian community that serves as home to many of the immigrants who have come to the U.S. in the last two decades. In the Support Center's Adult and Family Education Program, fifty languages can be heard in the classrooms and hallways as each year 700 students enroll in a variety of basic education, literacy, computer, and English-as-a-Second-Language classes. The Center also offers a reading program for preschool children and their parents; a volunteer program that provides outreach, advocacy, and translating services at the sponsoring hospital, Lutheran Medical Center; and many other social services. A new initiative has begun to link adult education with health education. The Family Support Center illustrates a model of services that can help recent immigrants ease their transition to the U.S., help their children succeed in school, help them find the health services they need, and help them become more fully integrated into their community and political life. Unfortunately, few communities are able to provide recent immigrants with these services, and those that do lack the capacity to meet existing needs. At the Sunset Park Support Center, for example, 600 residents are on a waiting list for services. Now as in the past, the United States is a country of immigrants. How our nation educates immigrants and their children; provides access to adequate health care, housing, and employment; and includes them in our political system will influence our ability to achieve our society's educational, health, economic, and moral goals. In this essay, we examine how adult education, a service that plays a key role in the lives of many recent immigrants, can act as a bridge for the immigrants and their families into both the educational and health care systems, and thus include them more fully in our society. We focus on New York City because it, with a handful of other big cities,