Editor's note: Nashville's public school system has come under intense scrutiny in recent years after nearing state takeover. As the district has wrestled with academic performance, it has also spent the past few years embroiled in schoolyard fights — between the city and state over charter-school laws, among bickering board members and administrators over politics. At the same time, parents with the means to send their children to private schools have fled from MNPS, while others have moved across county lines to escape the school system.

As for the kids who are left, many have families who actively dedicate themselves to public schools, often ones of their choice. But they're the lucky ones. Other families don't have the economic luxury to choose. The growing strain on resources, the widening demographic changes in Davidson County, the political turbulence behind the scenes, and the number of parents and promising students who have left the system indicate a looming crisis in Nashville public education.

Yet there is reason to hope, and a chance to act. This is the first in a three-part series probing the issues that face the beleaguered school district, the people they affect, and the district's reaches for success.

Crowded into a far corner of her South Nashville classroom, Yeylin Mishell Alvarado stares from her assigned seat at a projector screen.

Each flicker produces a new image from the French Revolution. A leader. A battle. A prison. Classmates shout out correct ID's: "Napoleon!" But Mishell sits quietly, speaking only to address a boy nearby tattooing his arm with a jumbo marker. Another three boys have fallen asleep, heads down on cold desks.

They'll be quizzed on this material at the end of class. But Mishell makes out only some of what her teacher is saying. The pictures on the screen, she doesn't know. The reasons for learning them, she doesn't comprehend. How is Napoleon going to help her get a driver's license, or apply for a job?

That's not the worst part, though.

The language the teacher is speaking — English — she doesn't understand.

She landed in Nashville a year ago with her little sister in tow. Her mom sent for them after securing a work visa. Life was tough at first — and still is. Even though she didn't come from a war-torn country, or miss years of school the way some of her immigrant peers have, she and her family have faced difficulties getting a foothold in America. Nonetheless, Nashville is the place that Mishell now calls home.

Except she can still only say that in Spanish.

After a year in Metro Nashville Public Schools, Mishell struggles to learn a language still foreign to her, in a world where it's far too tempting not to speak English. It's a struggle some 24,000 students here face daily, trying to master a new language (and decipher what it means) while their family speaks their native tongue at home. She and more than 11,575 other beginning English language learners — referred to as ELLs — carry that burden on their shoulders as they walk the halls of Metro Nashville's public schools.

Mishell attends Overton High School, considered one of the entry points for Nashville's immigrant population into the public school system, and hence into American life. It's a stone's throw from tony private Franklin Road Academy, and just three minutes from the governor's mansion.

But it might as well be in another country. The school is bursting at the seams, and a staggering 70 percent of its student body — that's 7 out of every 10 kids — comes from a low-income family.

That hurdle is compounded by a vast communications gap. At Overton, which serves South Nashville's sprawling mix of immigrant cultures, some 38 separate languages are spoken. At nearby high schools Glencliff and Antioch, according to the state report card, more than 1 in 6 students are trying to learn English while speaking another language at home.

The object is for students like Mishell to gradually become more comfortable speaking English. The world history class she attends as part of her ELL studies is "sheltered" — the second rung on a three-rung ladder meant to move her, and immigrant students like her, up into the school's general-education student body, then onward to graduation and out into life beyond.

That's the hope, anyway. The reality is a school system studded with classrooms like Mishell's, from Antioch to Woodbine to Inglewood. Classrooms where the class size makes individual attention all but impossible. Classrooms where students of different languages, nationalities and educational levels are thrown together, often with an instructor who didn't sign on to teach ELL courses. Classrooms where the object is to move kids through the digestive tract of the system, to meet tests and standards imposed by the bureaucracy — and to make room for the many more who are coming.

That last item is what makes ELL one of the most urgent issues facing the Metro public school system. Much has been made of NashvilleNext, the Metro Planning Department's sweeping attempt to anticipate the city's future. By 2040, the plan expects Nashville's population to grow by roughly a million people. As part of that population shift, it is projected that Latino residents alone will outnumber Caucasians. If schools such as Overton seem overcrowded and underequipped to handle the needs of that growing community now, the waters will only continue to rise.

Even now, the strain on the district puts Mishell at a decided disadvantage. Sitting in a classroom with 34 other kids, she doesn't just have to overcome a language barrier. She has to overcome her school system.

Nashville has been an It City for immigrants since the late 1970s and '80s, when the federal government began to settle refugees here. According to Remziya Suleyman — director of policy at the Muslim advocacy nonprofit American Center for Outreach, and herself a long-ago survivor of Kurdish refugee camps — refugee placement began in earnest here in the 1970s with Laotian settlements. Kurdish, Somali and Sudanese immigrants followed in the '90s.

Decades later, that trend continues. Today the Volunteer State accepts some 1,000 refugees a year, a fact that contributes to Nashville having one of the largest Kurdish communities outside the Middle East.

The number of new Americans settling here has more than doubled in the last decade, in figures provided by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a pro-immigration consortium of mayors and business leaders focused on economics. In 2012 alone, Nashville had the fastest growing immigrant population in the country. More than one in 10 people here were born outside the United States, almost half of them since 2000.

As a result, Nashville has the most diverse school system in the state, drawing immigrants from as far afield as Central and Latin America, Somalia, Kurdistan, Egypt, Thailand and Laos. Some 43,000 students statewide are just beginning to learn English. Nearly a third of them live here — largely in the melting pot of the city's South Side, where most of them also attend school.

The district requires students to register with the ELL office when they first enroll. By its own count, the children at those schools speak 140 different languages. Spanish dominates with 15,460 speakers — up 600 students over last year. Another 3,000 speak in Arabic, with 1,100 more in Kurdish.

Somali, Vietnamese, Nepali, Amharic, Burmese — these languages and many more are spoken daily in Metro schools. For that reason, those schools share similar needs — for more space, more help.

The same goes for their students.

Mishell, 15, and her family moved here from Guatemala, where her mom, Xeyli Alfaro, earned a master's degree and fostered a dream of becoming a journalist. Xeyli (pronounced Sheylee) first came to the U.S. as a Washington correspondent for a Salvadoran newspaper, La Prensa Grafica (The Graphic Press). She largely reported on efforts to pass the Dream Act, some politics and community news.

Back home, the kind of job she wanted was scarce. So she moved back to the States with a work permit, picking Nashville for its affordability. She worked here for a year before sending for her two daughters, landing a job writing for Hola! Tennessee, a bimonthly Spanish-language newspaper, and Spanish radio station Activa, WNVL-AM 1240. She would learn English, she decided, then work her way up to reporting for a major news outlet and return to D.C.

But on most days Xeyli finds that she barely needs English. Since her work mostly involves interviewing Spanish speakers, a little street English is enough to get by. Adjusting to life in the U.S. is hard enough, from navigating bureaucracy to simply getting around town, without working two jobs. Who has time to learn a language?

As a result, her ambitions have fallen by the wayside. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be, she says — for her or her girls. They just celebrated their one-year anniversary as "new Americans," yet they have been slow to pick up its speech.

Xeyli has degrees, drive, an education, high hopes for her girls, high hopes for herself. But if she continues to get by without learning English, she worries what will happen when Mishell graduates high school. What good is college, she wonders, if Mishell can't understand what they're saying?

But Mishell is lucky. Even if her mom is not fluent in English, she can read and write — a privilege many of Nashville's ELL families don't enjoy. Many children come to public education after missing years of school, clocking in years behind their peers. Many refugees don't know their birthday or have a birth certificate, much less a school transcript.

Literacy, not language, is the first hurdle many ELL students must clear. That's true also for many of their parents, says Kasar Abdulla, a product of MNPS and an immigrant from Kurdistan.

"Both my parents were illiterate in Kurdish, so it was difficult," she says. "Even the schools, to translate a piece of paper to Kurdish and give it to my father, it still didn't do him any service. He still can't read it, whether it's in English or Kurdish."

Now, as director of community relations at Valor Academy, a charter school on Nolensville Road south of Harding Place, Abdulla hopes to extend the kind of support families in her community currently aren't getting from their school system: translating, communicating, reaching out, reflecting diversity at the school inside and out. Thousands of children go to school here and don't see teachers who look like them. While nearly 1 in 5 students is Hispanic, only 1.2 percent of their teachers are — not even 1 out of 50.

That is hardly just a local problem. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, national think tanks like the Center for American Progress, and the National Education Association teachers' union have stressed the need for ELL students to see educators and role models who look like them and understand their experience — including how hard it is to master English as a second language.

Black students don't have it much better. They make up 45 percent of the district population while black teachers and staff make up little more than 1 in 4. By contrast, white teachers represent nearly 72 percent of the district workforce, but only 31 percent of students look like them — although many Middle Eastern families mark their children as white, for lack of a more specific category.

What isn't known, strangely enough, is how many Metro teachers understand the varied languages of their students. Remarkably, the district currently doesn't track bilingual teachers — at least not yet.

"Central Office or the people doing the hiring are taking the easy way out," says Mohamed-Shukri Hassan, a member of the mayor's newly formed New Americans Advisory Council from Somalia. Now a full-time interpreter and seven-year Nashville resident, Hassan — the former welcoming coordinator for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition — says the city owes it to its youngest newcomers to hire people from those communities.

"One thing that the Metro Schools hasn't really done is look within the refugee and immigrant community and look for those talents," he says. "There are a great amount of people who used to be teachers back home. They now can be their cultural ambassadors, can be resources to the school system.

"But those people [at MNPS] — I mean, there is no effort. I mean, it doesn't cut it."

The district is beginning to reach out into the community, but largely for volunteers. Last month, the district and mayor's office jointly named 20 bilingual mothers and fathers as "Parent Ambassadors" who help people in their respective communities navigate the Metro school system. Their tools include city-paid cellphones.

But if ELL students and parents find the system difficult, it puts just as much strain on teachers. In Mishell's classroom, her teacher, Ronnie Martin, faces a class that speaks 16 different languages. That useful piece of information wasn't provided by the school system; he figured it out for himself by asking each student to say hello in his or her native tongue.

To add more confusion, the 35 students don't just speak different languages. They represent different levels of educational ability, from high to nearly illiterate, making it that much harder to tailor lesson plans.

Martin hadn't intended to become an ELL teacher. He teaches social studies, and even then he doubles as Overton's freshman football coach. His charge in this sheltered world history class, he says, is to somehow use the French Revolution to teach English. He breaks students into groups for today's in-class assignment: unscrambling sentences in English about the early history of aviation.

Once grouped, however, Mishell and the kids in her corner almost exclusively speak Spanish. She understands the English words in front of her, she says, but she can't get them in the right order. Sitting nearby, though, is a boy who can. It's far easier to copy from him.

The interaction doesn't escape Martin's notice. He's taught at Overton for 19 years. As he walks the aisles handing out Scantrons for their quiz on the French Revolution's key faces and figures, he tells the teenagers to keep their eyes to themselves.

"They are known for just cheating," he says.

After he collects the finished tests, he lays down two of them side by side. They're identical.

"Here's our little girl," he says, plainly disappointed. "She just cheated. It's too tempting."

Mishell is a good girl, Martin says. Some kids really want to learn, he explains, but she's not one of them. Yet.

"They're very needy," he says. "And I would be, too, if I was in their country."

Mishell gets decent grades, generally Bs. But she hardly knows English. How can that be? Ironically enough, the one piece of advice she has for fellow immigrants is to learn English. If you want to do that and speak Spanish, she says, don't hang out with Hispanics.

She's joking, but it's a joke with an edge of truth. When her mom isn't insisting Mishell order her food or ask for things in English, she's talking with her Spanish-speaking friends. She should meet more people who speak English, Xeyli says, torn. It feels a little racist to say that, she says, but her daughter would learn the language so much faster.

It's easier for Mishell to surround herself with people she can actually talk to without the fear of being wrong, of misspeaking, of stumbling over their words, of feeling humiliated. Every time she opens her mouth, she prays she's saying the right thing.

When I ask Mishell why she cheated on her quiz last period, she lets out a nervous laugh. The words struggle to come in English — they only do for her when the pressure's on. "I don't know!" she blurts in a heavy accent, embarrassed. She searches for the right words as we squeeze through a hall crowded almost to capacity. So she decides to use English the best way she knows. She ducks her head and begins to type.

She abruptly holds up her phone up to me. The boy sitting in front of her bothers her, it reads. Her English isn't strong enough to tell the teacher to make him stop. "But why did you cheat?" I ask.

The answer is slow to come. "Coach Martin is not good for me," she says hours later, explaining that he talks too fast.

Xeyli has an equally hard time communicating with me. Instead of calling, she insists we email or text. It's easier that way. She knows some English, and it gets better every time we talk. And we can struggle through a conversation without a translator if we dig deep into the few dozen or so words we know from each other's vocabulary.

She's a hawk at tracking her kids' grades online. But advocating for her children is difficult and intimidating, Xeyli says. She has a good relationship with her school's translator, but it's more difficult with the teachers. Worries run rampant in her community: Who should they ask? Will someone understand? Will they understand the answers?

Somehow it comes easier for her younger daughter, Dannely, 12. She goes to Margaret Allen Middle School, and she gets a kick out of speaking English. It's fun, and despite being the baby in the family, she's the best at it. The girl dreams about the day she and her mom can carry on full conversations. The farthest they get now is basic phrases and telling Mom she's hungry.

Dannely's teachers glow when they lean over her shoulder to read her work. Whether it's math or reading, the slender girl with the long, thick braided hair is a good student, her teachers say. Her English is catching on — a world away from her first day last year, when she barely spoke a word.

In her class, teacher Amanda Kail picks up a wide, floppy book. On it, printed in big dark letters, are the words "I Hate English!" She tells the fifth- and sixth-graders why an observer is in the room: to learn what it's like learning English as a second language. She points to the book.

"You guys are the experts," she says. A boy who speaks Arabic, wearing a blue polo, turns around and smiles at me.

The truth is, in most classes they aren't experts in anything, Kail tells me. They struggle: with the language, with literacy, with long-undiagnosed problems, with the content. Often they sit in the back of their general education classes, quietly fighting to figure it out.

"It's so overwhelming," Kail says. That's why she has her students read "Why Am I Dumb," a poem from a collection of stories about a fictional boy who moves from Mexico speaking Spanish to the U.S. immersed in English. They read the poem twice: once in English, again in Spanish.

"When do we get to read a book in Arabic?" asks the boy with the blue polo. Next book, says Ms. Kail. The boy grins.

Kids in this English language development class, which serves as their reading course, speak Spanish, Arabic, Somali and Twi, an African language native to southern Ghana. Independently, they have to summarize the poem in English.

The boy in the story used to earn good grades in school in his home country. But in this foreign one, they've sunk. The only light he sees at the end of the tunnel is that his math scores aren't so bad.

That's how many of them feel, Kail says.

Not being able to communicate puts enormous strain on students as well as teachers and administrators. Not long ago, the front office at Overton was thrown into chaos when a boy had a breakdown on his first day of school. He spoke a little-recognized language, and not a word of anything else. Despite the translators, the ELL teachers, and everyone outside the principal's door, no one knew what he was speaking or saying.

They couldn't even figure out his name.

In theory, Metro Schools' comprehensive approach to English language learners means preparing students linguistically for rigorous classes, culturally for the world outside, and developmentally for college and the workforce. In practice, though, there's a rush to put students into classes they're not prepared for, to ready them for Tennessee's one-size-fits-all testing and speed them through the system.

"They can't read the test," says Shuler Pelham, Overton's principal. Beginning ELL students like Mishell and Dannely got a one-year reprieve from taking reading language arts or English tests in the spring, but will have to take them in 2015. (The district likely asked the state to ignore their math scores last year, too, but science and social studies still counted.) The student who had the meltdown will be expected to take a TCAP test in the spring.

Last school year, 8 percent of English language learners like Dannely in elementary and middle school scored at grade level on the state TCAP exam. After advancing out of ELL into the first year of a transition program toward general education classes, 27 percent of students achieved grade level. By year two, nearly 40 percent were on target.

But even after MNPS determines children have graduated out of ELL status and mostly understand English, only half meet grade level — much like their English-speaking peers. Seeking some good news in this grim situation, the district urged people to look on the bright side: More English learners scored at grade level than last year. It is true, and commendable, that the gap between ELL students and their peers is smaller in MNPS than in the gaps within systems outside Davidson County. But the local gulf between the two is still enormous.

So what about charter schools — the district's most hotly contested competitors, running independent schools with district tax dollars? When it comes to serving ELL families, charters have a mixed record. While seven such schools landed on the state's honor roll this year, for high test scores or best improvement, some had so few ELL students the state's annual report card didn't report them in the 2013-14 school year. Some schools counted a handful of ELL students, while others, primarily south of downtown, reported non-native speakers making a large swath of their community. These include Cameron College Prep with 35 percent ELL students, 26 percent at STEM Prep, and 18.4 percent at Knowledge Academy.

It makes sense that students learning English as a second language will score lower on state tests than their native counterparts. But ELL students trailed English speakers by 42 percent at grade level in high school English II, and by 28 percent among third-through-eighth-graders in reading. ELL students fare much better in math, where they score within 13 to 17 percentage points of their fluent peers.

The state doesn't just administer these tests to grade students. The results are used to grade teachers, principals, schools, and school districts. It's part of a data-driven movement, and graduation requirements are just as important. Although MNPS graduated 2 percent more seniors last school year, less than 80 percent of students graduated within a span of four years plus one summer course.

"Testing and accountability did not have a school like mine in mind," says Pelham, who wishes his school's statistics didn't take a hit whenever he and his teachers decide a student needs another year to fully grasp English. He's had graduates tell him that they left Overton and went out into the world, only to find they lacked the English skills they should have gotten in high school.

The situation puts Pelham in a hard place. With an emphasis on numbers and data coming from the state and all the way down to his district level supervisors, the pressure is to advance students through the system, get their numbers up, their scores up, their literacy up. Up, up, up. Everything up.

But often, for students moving to the U.S. with little to no English knowledge — and often years behind grade level — four years is not enough. It takes five to seven years to fully comprehend a different language, says Kevin Stacey, the MNPS director in charge of the district-wide English Language Learners program. "Regardless of that fact," he says, "it's not [but] one or two years" they get in ELL.

Pelham and other school leaders want the state to relax graduation-reporting requirements, or to at least post what the graduation rate is for students who finish with a one-year extension. The state says it will look at that possibility, but indicates there's no rush.

Maybe not for them. The district has close to 1,000 more ELL students than it had this time last school year. On top of that, the city's ELL teachers are generally newer to teaching, and the district worries about getting them to stay. Meanwhile, learning standards are changing, along with those for ELL students, according to Stacey.

"The outcomes last year were not working. We were not achieving as much as we would like to achieve. We had to re-evaluate our approach," Stacey told the school board last month. If the board measures progress in reading, writing and speaking, he explained, or exiting out of the EL program through a language proficiency test, the district missed its targets last year.

Since he took the job full time, Stacey's visited churches, Kurdish community groups and two Spanish radio stations. He's talking about restarting community groups and networking with universities on certifying ELL teachers. He wants to put out a multicultural guide for teachers and staff. He wants to provide monthly professional development to 31 schools, to all grade levels.

But he has only 13 people on his staff to do that. ELL may pose a growing need in the system, but that's not reflected in the district's budget.

While 13.5 percent of Nashville students will learn English as beginners this year, MNPS spends less than 2 percent of its $790 million budget directly on them. The district budgets $12.5 million for dedicated ELL teachers, translators and Central Office staff. The feds contributed almost another $2 million in funding, for curriculum, professional development and equipment.

The total budget is a tough one to calculate, says district spokesman Joe Bass. According to Bass, it does not include a large number of teachers who may have skills or certifications to support English language learners, but aren't designated as ELL teachers on the books.

Regardless, it's an area where extra allocated resources pay off, according to Michael Griffith, a policy adviser for the Education Commission of the States who tracks state policy trends and academic research. At Overton, principal Pelham shifts around his school's funds to hire more ELL teachers, in order to stretch his buck a little further. Griffith says catching up English language learners is the most doable way to improve student outcomes and test scores — if schools, districts and governments play their cards right.

"The real feeling right now is if the state wants to raise its student test scores, on average, the low-hanging fruit are ELL kids," he says, stressing the importance of a high-quality program to advance kids from beginning to novice speakers. "There hasn't been a lot of focus. There has been, in some states, enough money and there hasn't been a clear goal for the ELL kids. Where do you want them at?"

The truth is, there's no magic bullet to improve ELL programs, Griffith says. But promising solutions are out there. High-quality programs and investment can move children through the English-learning process better prepared for the next level, with higher test scores and posing less of a drain on district scores.

Griffith said as much to state officials as they were mulling changes to how Tennessee funds local school districts. Money for EL teachers and translators comes largely from the state, based on a formula that even the state comptroller says is too complex. But as the state grapples with belt tightening and fighting over which school districts can get a bigger serving of state funds — if indeed any can — rejiggering ELL funding is far down on the priority list.

That has as much to do with the political climate as the economy. Any change would have to win support from a conservative state governing body that doesn't want to support any initiative that could help illegal immigrants. The state legislature for years has pushed "English Only" legislation that punishes people who speak another language. Recently, lawmakers refused to go along with a program to allow foreign-born children brought to the state illegally to pay in-state college tuition. Another program makes community college and technical school free for all graduating high-schoolers — except undocumented seniors.

Even if lawmakers allotted more funds, however, that alone wouldn't solve the biggest problem ELL students face: how long it takes to learn a new language as students get older. In another Overton sheltered world history class, a quiet girl from Rwanda struggles to figure out which ocean is south of Asia. It takes her several torturous minutes, even with coaching, a compass key and a map. Frustration, strain and longing to comprehend are visible on the girl's pained face. Even then, it's tough to say whether she truly understands.

She's been here a month.

"When you have two-thirds of your students not with an English-speaking background, when a girl was in Rwanda one month ago, 'Here, you're going to take a test in Algebra I one month from now,' that's not fair," Pelham says.

"Funding is not the answer, but without funding, you don't have a chance. What our kids need more than anything else is time. We can't purchase more time."

Time is one thing the vast majority of ELL students have. Sixty-eight percent of the district's ELL students are kindergarten through fourth-graders. (Middle schools follow with more than 18 percent, with the remaining 13 percent in high school.) As such, they have years to master the language. Casa Azafrán, the Conexión Americas multicultural hub seen as the gateway to Nashville's diverse South Side, is opening an MNPS pre-K, giving kids a bilingual head start. It's a pet project of Jesse Register, Metro's outgoing director of schools.

But Register will wrap up his contract next summer. When he leaves, he'll bequeath the district a handful of thorny issues, such as turning around persistently struggling schools on the city's East Side and establishing a strategy going forward. The school board will have to decide what kind of person they want to replace him — someone who can handle the 84,000-student district and all its pockets of problems and chances.

What that will mean for addressing the city's ELL needs is anything but clear, says Francis Guess, a longtime human rights advocate and former commissioner on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. With an ever-growing immigrant community, Guess says, there's a fear that Nashville's melting pot could someday heat up into a "cauldron which comes to a boil and blows up."

For ELL students Mishell's age, time is a luxury they don't have. Now a second-year freshman after falling one credit short last year, she is in her last year of English Language Development classes, Pelham says. Next year she'll have to join the general education English class, whether or not she's ready.

Time is no less precious to Xeyli. In the past, lack of language skills left her walking two hours in the snow in Washington, D.C., when she couldn't figure out how to buy a train ticket. It left her an easy victim when a boyfriend took advantage of her, asking her for money because she couldn't read the electric bill. It left her reluctant to call police — for fear she wouldn't know what to say — about almost anything, including the guy she sees creeping around her apartment complex.

"I've always said people who immigrate are warriors," she says through a translator. "We face a world that is different from our culture. We can be the smartest people in our countries, but we become people who are deaf and cannot talk, and that's a person who is completely disabled."

She texts me about her latest battle, something she describes as one of the most frustrating experiences of her life — getting screwed over at the airport. Delays and other hassles are a headache even for English speakers. Without the ability to speak English, those relatively minor inconveniences became a threat to her family's future.

While Xeyli was trying to send her 18-year-old son Erickson back to Guatemala after a summer visit, an apparently disgruntled employee was allegedly cutting cable and trying to burn down a flight radar center outside Chicago. The incident sent ripples of disruption through the nation's air traffic.

Erickson, who speaks less English than the rest of the family, was supposed to be in Guatemala for a university entrance exam on Monday, in hopes of becoming a physician. It's cheaper to attend school back home than here. But first he needed to take the test. Xeyli asked an airline attendant where Erickson would sit, since his plane ticket lacked a seat number.

Sorry, the woman said. He's been bumped.

Xeyli pulled out all the English she could muster to argue that he needed — needed — to be in Guatemala by Monday morning. The words wouldn't come. She couldn't make the attendant understand. The attendant grew peevish.

Do you have someone here who speaks Spanish? No, the attendant said. But here's a customer service number you can call.

The story ends happily — eventually. Erickson's luggage made it to his home country. But he didn't land until the next day after getting bumped from a second 6 a.m. flight. He finally got onto a 2 p.m. plane, right around the time he should have finished his exam. After Xeyli pulled a few strings, the university agreed to let him take the test late.

"I felt like the woman didn't really want to help me," Xeyli says. "I don't want to think that they were racist to me because of the way I look. I don't want to think that. If I were to know a little bit more English, I wouldn't have had to go to so much trouble.

"Every defeat I have because of my language barrier helps me realize I have to learn English. ... Going back to Guatemala is not a solution any more."

The choices for her daughters are better here. They can get their degrees from U.S. universities that will be respected across the world, unlike a Guatemalan one. They can be bilingual. And as a mom, she can make better money here, and a better life for all of them.

"Did I make a mistake?" she wonders aloud, then answers her own question. Taking them back to Guatemala would be the mistake, she concludes.

But learning English is hard work. It will require Xeyli to resume the one-on-one tutoring she used to do before her children followed her here. She makes a deal with Mishell: If her English doesn't get better, she's coming with her to tutoring.

Xeyli wants badly to learn English. So she can talk directly to me and not a translator. So my tape recorder won't run out of space because every question and answer has to be said twice.

I ask Mishell what she wants. Does she want English as urgently as her mom wants it for her? If she could, would she go back to Guatemala? Where she knows the language, where she has her family?

No, she says. She does want to learn English, even though that doesn't always seem the case.

"I want to learn English because I want to show my family it wasn't a mistake to bring us here," she says.

Email editor@nashvillescene.com.