But as their ranks more than doubled in the past 20 years, resources have not kept pace.

Now a financial setback is cutting into a program stretched thin, leaving hundreds of students without a popular summer enrichment course and jeopardizing its planned expansion and other initiatives as well.

In 2002, the state Department of Education received $4 million in federal "impact aid" to be used over two years to defray the cost of education and healthcare for Hawai'i's Micronesian migrants. The money was used in the ESLL program.

But this fiscal year, the entire allocation — $10.6 million — went toward healthcare expenses for that population. None of it came to the DOE, which dealt a blow to programs that have benefited a range of immigrant students.

Belste Philip, who is from the Marshall Islands, says it's a struggle being separated from some of her brothers. Jeff Widener • The Honolulu Advertiser

Last summer, the six-week program covered a range of study skills and life skills, some of the exercises tied to field trips. For example, Lum said, the students visited the Arizona Memorial and then wrote formal letters about their experience to President Bush.

"We take them out to the community and have a discussion, and try to tie the experience to their world," Lum said.

DOE planners are writing grant proposals in hopes of restoring and even expanding that program next summer, and providing new programs to help students like Belste Philip chart their path through school. The 15-year-old said she enjoyed the summer program.

"It helped me to pick up my writing," said Philip, who is Marshallese, showing the letter she had written to Bush.

A struggle all around

The ESLL program can feel like home to immigrant students struggling to find their place in Hawai'i.

But the DOE has a struggle all its own, trying to keep up with the growing demands of ESLL.

Gerry Madrazo, an education specialist in the statewide ESLL program, said public schools have 140 teacher slots, a number that hasn't risen to serve a steadily increasing load of immigrant students. Each school finds its way to cope.

Lum has taught at McKinley for 26 years and, over that period, has watched the strains in the classroom increase. McKinley's 384 ESLL students speak more than a dozen languages at home and need help with English in school, and some require special education services as well.

The school manages with its full-time ESLL teachers and a few from other departments who take a section during a free period, she said, but the class size is up near 30 and the work isn't getting easier.

Part of the challenge is rooted in broad socioeconomic changes, Lum said.

"My first few years of teaching, the family was a nuclear unit — father-mother-children," she said. "Now it's dysfunctional. Now it's mostly single parents. Or, the parents may leave their son or daughter here with a grandparent; maybe they think that America has the opportunity.

"But the child has no role models at home, so they don't do homework. Academics is no longer the priority. They see friends with cell phones, and the material things become a value."

The recent surge in Micronesian students — the DOE now serves 2,521 — has placed particular strain on the resources of the ESLL program because this population faces the largest cultural adjustment in addition to the language barrier. More accustomed to a culture in which formal schooling and family life are somewhat more separate, elementary school parents are often unaware of expectations that they monitor their child's studies and school activities by signing forms and other interactions.

For Belste Philip, the struggle includes separation from some of her brothers: She said her 10-year-old brother lives with her, but others are in the Marshall Islands and in Kentucky.

Philip has persevered, however. She shot an appreciative glance at her teacher.

"She taught us not to be shame in front of people, to show people that we're smart," Philip said of Lum.

"It's hard, but I'm trying my best."

Impact aid grants are awarded to states and territories where migrants live. The money is authorized by the compacts of free association, agreements that Congress signed a year ago. The compacts allow migration from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau and the Republic of the Marshall Islands to U.S. territories, in exchange for U.S. military access to the region.

With the latest allocation of impact aid allotted to medical costs, state DOE planners have turned their attention to the 2005-06 school year. The state hopes to expand the summer enrichment program from 10 to 20 schools statewide, said Lani Kapololu, the ESLL program specialist who is writing a grant proposal for $100,000.

There's another proposal for a center that would focus on the needs of "newcomer" immigrant students, especially the Micronesians, said Louisa Wise-Ginlack, a specialist in the Office of Curriculum and Instruction.

"It would be a place for them to go for help," she said. "Right now they don't know where to go."

Request to governor

Wise-Ginlack said she wrote to the governor to ask that the DOE be allotted about $2 million annually of the impact aid money to finance this initiative and other improvements targeting the neediest immigrant students.

There are some other sources of money but few with the flexibility of the impact aid, Kapololu said.

"We can use that fund to pay for field trips, acculturation programs," Kapololu said. "Schools were able to use the funds how they needed. They could even include parents on the field trips, which can be important."

The flexibility also allows programs to help all immigrant groups, which was a boon to students like Stanley Chau, an 18-year-old senior at McKinley, another beneficiary of the summer program, where he boned up on essential study skills. During the summer, Lum said, there is not the pressure to keep up with records and testing paperwork, so the faculty can focus entirely on teaching.

Supplemental tutoring gave Chau, who also receives special-education services, the boost he needed to bring graduation this school year within reach.

"I don't flunk health now," he said with a broad grin, a reference to what had been a problem class. "I passed health."