Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSource profiles the Oakland Unified program, which has offered a variety of social services to unaccompanied immigrant minors since 2013.

• With the fallout from the family separation policy at the U.S. border, it's essential we find ways to assist children of immigrants who don't have a support system in place. How can Oakland Unified serve as a model elsewhere?

• Here's more on how donors can help when it comes to the family separation crisis.

One night three years ago, Milton kissed his mother gently on the head, careful not to wake her, and slipped out of their home in rural Guatemala where he had lived his whole life. As his parents and six younger siblings slept, he caught a bus north. His goal: reaching the United States. He was 14.

“If I told them, I knew they wouldn’t let me go,” said Milton, who’s now 17 and declined to give his last name because he still fears violence from home, both for himself and his family. “But it’s not safe there. They’re killing people where I come from. I knew the best way to help my family was to leave and get an education and a job so I could send them money.”

Traveling on foot, on busses and trains, often sleeping outside, Milton eventually found his way across the border and ended up in Oakland, where an aunt lives. As national attention focuses on immigrant children separated from their parents at the border, Alameda County, where Oakland is situated, has been absorbing unaccompanied immigrant children for years — and in fact has the second-highest number of unaccompanied minors in California, behind Los Angeles County. They’re drawn to Oakland and the East Bay mostly through family ties — networks of relatives who can help ease the transition to a new country and refugee groups that place them with foster families. Even under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, unaccompanied minors have continued to come to the United States.

Oakland Unified has embraced these students, offering a host of services to help them find housing and health care, academic tutoring, legal services, mental health counseling and other amenities. Since June 2013, when gang violence in Central America began to escalate, the district has enrolled more than 1,200 unaccompanied youth.

Read the full article about Oakland Unified providing refuge for immigrant youth by Carolyn Jones at edsource.org.