Immigrants face many barriers in moving from one country to another. Today's massive migrations are dislocating students from their cultures, families, and their schooling. In Iran, such students were not able to enter Iranian schools prior to 2017. Even now, many such immigrant students are being educated in centres administered by non-governmental organisations (NGO) where the schooling is focused on providing youth with knowledge on nutrition, health care, language and mathematics, and maintaining family links where possible. Still, external and internal factors lead to many at-risk students dropping out of the programs. The researchers have focused on the failure of at-risk students in mathematics in four of these schools supported by two NGO agencies. It was clear that the inertia of both teachers and students in mathematics was influencing both teacher choices and planning and student choices in providing conceptual understanding and algorithmic performance. Given the lack of instrumentation to gauge and describe organisational and managerial aspects of the schools and meaningful assessments of students' progress, the researchers modified a questionnaire from organisational inertia for examining the administrative factors in business and created a series of mathematics tests to quantify and describe at-risk students' movement through either second or third grade mathematics classes. The data provided by an Exploratory Factor Analysis of the assessment outcomes provide a predictive picture of student persistence versus administrative changes and, more generally, on ways that teacher/educators and educational staff members can implement strategies to help immigrant at-risk students transition from mindless repetition to understanding in their mathematics school work