Distant Learning

New immigrant students had the most to gain at Virginia’s Justice High—and the most to lose once the pandemic hit.

- By Alexandra Starr

On the night Esteban’s mother went to the hospital, five ambulances crowded the street in front of their red-brick walk-up in the DC suburbs. It was late May 2020, and COVID-19 had swept through their densely packed apartment complex, where many of the one- and two-bedroom units housed multiple immigrant families from Central America. More than half of the people in their zip code who were tested that April had the virus—a rate roughly 20 percent higher than in the rest of Virginia—and 17-year-old Esteban, his parents, and the family with whom they shared their apartment were among them. For weeks his mother had a splitting headache, and her throat hurt so much she had trouble swallowing. By that May evening, she had deteriorated to the point where she could barely breathe on her own.

Out on the sidewalk, amid the ambulances’ flashing lights, Esteban held his infant sister, Amalia, while his father climbed into a waiting Uber with his mother. (They hadn’t called 911 because one of Esteban’s uncles had been ferried in an ambulance after he had contracted COVID and incurred a bill he had no way of paying.) As the only English-speaking member of the family, Esteban argued he should go to the hospital. His father disagreed. “You need to take care of the baby,” he said.

It was a terrifying prospect. When his parents brought Amalia home seven months earlier, Esteban had gazed in wonder at her delicate, tiny form and refused to hold her. “He was scared he might hurt her,” his father recalled. Now, with his parents heading to the emergency room, Esteban was in charge of looking after his sister for the very first time. It would be the longest three weeks of his life.