Drawing on data from a 3-year qualitative study on the transition of immigrant youth, we seek to understand the connections among district programming and policy, teacher perspectives, and the ways in which students experience initial schooling. Specifically, this article examines the following research questions: How does district leadership define the challenge and opportunities of working with older immigrant students? In the face of this definition, what approaches and perspectives to instruction are taken by teachers at the Northwest Newcomer Center? To answer these questions, we juxtapose the ideas and beliefs of various personnel in the district regarding the best way to educate recent immigrants. To sharpen our analytic lens, we utilize the concepts of universalism and differentiation (Reeves, 2004 Reeves, J. 2004. “Like everybody else”: Equalizing educational opportunity for English language learners. TESOL Quarterly: A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages and of Standard English as a Second Dialect, 38(1): 43–66.  [Google Scholar]) as a tool to explore the perspectives that teachers and leaders took in educating immigrant students and the impact that this had on practice.