After a decade-long absence, the Puget Sound Training Center, in partnership with Renton Technical College, is bringing back its English as a Second Language (ESL) courses, where immigrant, refugee and under-served individuals living in South King County can receive every possible advantage for job training — including improving their English.

“I feel that the ESL class is going to really help. We have a lot of individuals that they want to do well, but they just don’t have the education. And so that’s what we need to do is to help them,” said Puget Sound Training Center (PSTC) Founder and President Joseph Drake.

Drake started the Renton-based nonprofit organization in 1998 and has partnered with Boeing Employee Community Fund, American Red Cross, Safeway, FedEx and more to help local immigrants find jobs.

The ESL classes will be taught by Jawahir Ali, an ESL professor and faculty member of the College and Career Pathways department at Renton Technical College (RTC), which has the English Language Acquisition Foundations program that “supports immigrants and refugees to improve their English for college and career success.”

For four days a week, Ali will teach English reading, writing, speaking and listening skills in a small classroom at the PSTC headquarters. Orientation for the 11-week session will be during the first week of the college’s fall quarter. While the majority of students in the ESL classes will be PSTC clients, a handful of students from English Language Acquisition Foundations will also be in attendance.

The original ESL classes had been an important part of PSTC’s job training curriculum, but in 2012 and 2013, use of the courses waned.

“There wasn’t as much demand as there is now for ESL classes,” said Samantha Nelson, the Interim Associate Dean of College and Career Pathways at Renton Technical College, who worked as an ESL teacher at PSTC for four years.

“For us [at Renton Technical College], during COVID, we lost all of our off-campus locations, due to various reasons, and so when the Puget Sound Training Center was asking about having classes again, we were interested because we need to rebuild all of these off-campus locations that we used to have all over the county for ESL. We also have this incredible demand right now for classes because of all the newly-arrived immigrants and refugees.”

According to the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), Washington has helped more than 30,000 refugees from over 70 countries re-settle throughout the state over the last decade. As of April 2022, Washington state had welcomed 3,200 immigrants from Afghanistan since October 2021 and had welcomed over 6,500 Ukrainians since 2010.

Nelson explained that the college has a new contract with the DSHS program Limited English Proficiency Pathway, which helps eligible immigrants and refugees to receive benefits that will help them find jobs in Washington state.

“I knew that the Puget Sound Training Center was and is a provider for employment services so, to me, it totally made sense that we have a class here again,” Nelson said. “We have lots of students from Afghanistan and Ukraine, but Spanish is still our biggest language that is being spoken.”

The classes have a total of 30 students who are split into two separate classes from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m, Monday through Thursday. One class of 15 students takes place Mondays and Wednesdays, and the other 15-student class is on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Ali said that most students are expected to be beginner English learners, so lesson plans will be built around and upon their skill levels.

“Our main goal is to make that connection between education and work,” she said. “And so a lot of my lesson plans will be based on, you know, what type of language will they need on the job.”

Ali is originally from Somalia, where she and her family fled civil war, arriving in Seattle when she was 4 years old. She is bilingual in Somali and English and has been teaching ESL for 10 years. While Ali will be the sole teacher, multilingual case managers at PSTC will be on-hand to assist with any language barriers that may come up during class.

“I think a common misconception with ESL is that we’re teaching in other languages, and that’s just impossible,” said Nelson. “So the classes are taught in English and we have strategies around people who don’t speak any English or have super limited English.”

One PSTC case manager in particular is Yelda Aziz, who emigrated to Seattle from Afghanistan in 2018. Like Ali, Aziz and her family were fleeing a civil war.

When Aziz arrived in Western Washington, she could only speak Dari and Pashto.

“I started [English] classes from zero,” she said. “Like the reading and writing was kind of good for me, but listening and speaking were a zero.”

Aziz soon learned English and she actually became a PSTC client. After six months with the training center, she was hired on as a PSTC case manager and becoming one of the center’s many success stories.

With the ESL program’s return, it’s expected that the classes will remain at a lower skill level for the time being.

“Our client base, being at that [lower] level of English is probably why we’ll stay that way for a little while, just because that’s what our clients really need,” said PSTC Employment and Outreach Manager Derek Drake. “So it makes it pretty simple for them to work with their case manager and do training programs. But the goal, I think, would be to advance into some of the different levels as well.”

While classes for the fall session have already been set up, PSTC clients and Renton Technical College students who are interested in the ESL course are encouraged to reach out.

“We will still allow students to enroll afterwards, as long as we have space,” said Nelson.

For Joseph Drake, the return of the ESL program opens up the horizons of the training center and its clients.

“This is a journey that I’m excited about. I have a young group of people — and I’m talking about three and four generations of individuals — and I’m just excited about them and excited about the way that they are taking control,” he said.

For more information, visit pstrainingcenter.org and rtc.edu/college-career-pathways.