Fabricio Funes left Honduras carrying nothing but a toothbrush, some money and medicine in a backpack.

“But in the car on the way here there was an accident, so (he and his friends) left everything behind and just started walking,” said Brenda Saravia, a paraprofessional and translator with the Hall County School District. “They were afraid they were going to get caught.”

About 65 refugee children like Funes joined Hall County Schools in the past school year, and as many as 30 enrolled in Gainesville City Schools. Months later, they are still learning the language, culture and weather, slowly acclimating to their new home and new schools in the U.S.

“We started getting an influx in September,” said Lynn Murphy, who teaches English as a second language in Hall’s Upstart Program. When Hall began enrolling a high volume of students who spoke little or no English, they decided to move the students to Lanier Charter Career Academy and put them in their own program.

“I went from 25 to about 75 students,” Murphy said. “So we had to add staff.”

Two of Murphy’s students in the Upstart Program, Funes, 18, and Cynthia Alvarez, 16, of Mexico, crossed the border this past summer to meet family in the U.S.

Funes lived in Honduras with his brother after his mother left for the states when Funes was 2 years old. Between the political corruption in his country and a strained relationship with his brother, Funes had been dreaming of escaping to the U.S.

He arrived in the U.S. in June, and Alvarez crossed the border from Mexico with her uncles less than a month later.

“She wanted to come here to experience something different, but her mom didn’t want her to come by herself,” Saravia said.

Between January and July 2014, approximately 1,154 children came to Georgia through the federal office of refugee resettlement.

President Barack Obama’s administration began a program in October to give refugee status to some children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, to manage the influx of children crossing the border illegally.

Both Funes and Alvarez were detained when they arrived in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than 7,000 children enter the Unaccompanied Alien Children program each year, and the vast majority are from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras.

The children often come to the United States to escape violence, abuse or persecution, to seek family members or to find work.

“There are a lot of political problems in Honduras, and corruption is one of those problems,” said Saravia, who is also from Honduras. “Going to school was also very hard (for Funes), because in public schools you get assaulted. He was even threatened with guns, knives, every kind of weapon.”

At his new school, Funes doesn’t worry about such dangers.

“I wanted a change in my life,” Funes said in Spanish.

The hardest adjustment, he said, is the language.

Though most of the refugee students still speak very little English, they are beginning to understand it well. They work with paraprofessional translators including Saravia, and their classes are all taught in English to give them an immersion experience.

“The learning is all up to the child,” Murphy said. “Those who want to learn English, they begin to understand it, and the spoken English is one of the things to come later, along with written English.”

She said students have access to a translator, and she uses a lot of hand motions and signals when speaking English to the students. But it’s most helpful for them “to drown in it a little bit.”

Alvarez said she is happy to be in the U.S. and particularly at Lanier Charter Career Academy.

“She feels that she has learned more here in the United States in school,” Saravia said.

Alvarez and Funes both hope to earn their GEDs and then progress to higher education. Funes would like to go to Lanier Technical College and, one day, own a business as a mechanic.

Alvarez said, if she must return to Mexico, she would first like to study cosmetology in the U.S. to help her mother at their salon back home.

If she does not have to return, she would like to make a life in the states and study medicine.

Murphy said she’s impressed daily by the refugees’ strength and resilience.

“Some of them brought just the clothes on their back,” she said. “It’s amazing the stories we have heard. They’re very strong. I don’t know that an American child could make it through all those different struggles.”