Thread: Schools struggle to cope as Chicago gets more refugees

Far North Side schools struggle to cope as Chicago gets more refugees
Elementaries on Chicago's Far North Side are struggling to cope with an unexpected increase in children from war-torn areas
By Stephanie Banchero | Tribune staff reporter
January 1, 2008

In a cramped grade school classroom on the city's Far North Side, refugees from 17 countries stutter and stumble their way through a lesson on a weather pattern that is totally foreign to most of them: "It's cold outside. It's snowing."

Downstairs, a group of 6th graders from war-torn counties such as Burundi and Myanmar gather around a kidney-shaped table as the teacher slowly guides them through a 2nd-grade-level book. "Clippity-clop. Clippity-clop," they read together.

And in a hallway on the first floor, a 5-year-old refugee from Somalia clutches his teacher's hand with such ferocity that the teacher's knuckles turn white. Since he arrived in September, the slender and withdrawn child has been afraid to leave his teacher's side, even when she goes to the bathroom.




Swift Elementary and a handful of other nearby schools unexpectedly received dozens of refugees at the beginning of the school year, after federal officials issued a waiver to a section of the Patriot Act, allowing more refugees into the U.S.

These schools are accustomed to taking in refugees, but rarely have they seen so many arrive at once.

Between July and September, about 1,200 immigrants fleeing war-ravaged nations arrived in Illinois, as many as came during all of the previous fiscal year, according to the Illinois Department of Human Services. Many of them fled the strife in Burundi and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

The vast majority of the refugee families settled on Chicago's Far North Side, long a gateway area for immigrants. For the most part, school-age children enroll in a half-dozen Chicago public schools in the Edgewater and Uptown neighborhoods.

Culture shock

Unlike immigrants coming from, say, Mexico, or even the refugees that came from Bosnia in the 1990s, this new crop of transplants has little familiarity with Western culture. Many of them have spent their entire lives in refugee camps, with little formal education.

This presents schools with unique challenges.

At Swift, one little boy would not go to music class because he was afraid to climb the school's stairs -- he had never seen a staircase before. A little girl spent the first day of class on the floor, using her chair as a desk to write on.

Many of the new arrivals, who come from hot climates, prefer to wear sandals even when it's freezing outside.

Some are overwhelmed by their new surroundings and cry for days, even weeks.

"We love the diversity and we are so happy to have them, but we just weren't fully prepared for so many all at one time," said Harlee Till, principal at Swift, 5900 N. Winthrop Ave. "They came in so fast and furious that we had to scramble to find translators. We've had to help get them winter coats and shoes. This is a whole new group of kids that we don't have much experience with."

Chicago Public Schools officials don't know how many refugees enrolled this school year, but Swift got at least 45 and nearby Gale Elementary took in at least 40 students.

In the 1990s, most refugees arriving in gateway neighborhoods such as Uptown and Edgewater were from Eastern European countries such as Bosnia and Russia. By 2003, Africans from Liberia, Somalia and Ethiopia became the main group. In the last 18 months, Myanmar refugees -- and to a lesser extent Burundians -- have predominated.

Because civil conflicts have raged in these countries for decades, many of the refugees were born or lived most of their lives in camps. They tend to be less educated than their American classmates. The Myanmar refugees, especially, have trouble learning English because their language is far different in sound and structure.

"You also have to take into account the trauma they are dealing with due to the civil strife, and the trauma of relocating from their homes, to refugee camps, then to the United States," said Shana Wills with the non-profit Heartland Alliance, which helped resettle 80 refugees in September, five times the typical number.

Born in exile

In Room 204 at Swift, Pyo E'sa, a slight and obedient 6th grader, sits at the table with seven other students who lack English skills. With the teacher's guidance, Pyo reads haltingly: "In came a horse. Clippity-clop, clippity-clop. Clippity-clippity-clippity clop."

Pyo, 11, was born in a grim refugee camp on the Thailand-Myanmar border. Her parents are ethnic Karens, a group that lives mainly in the hilly eastern region of Myanmar and has been fighting for decades for an independent state.

In 1995, the family was chased into the camp after rebels burned their village to the ground, said the girl's mother, Ta Kaw Paw.

In the camp, they lived in a small bamboo hut with no electricity, surviving on rice and chili-flavored paste. Pyo received some schooling in the camp, but her education there was "unstable," her mother said.




"The teachers were not qualified," she said through a translator. "I do not know what my children learn. I do not know if they learn at all. It's very bad for them. I feel sad that they didn't get what they need."

Though her daughter has been in America only a few months, Paw said she believes the education the girl is getting at Swift is first-rate.

Illinois schools get little funding to help assimilate refugees. The state has a three-year, $1.5 million federal education grant that it doles out mainly to community groups that help tutor children and their parents. Chicago gets $150,000 and uses it for after-school and summer tutoring programs. But city schools get no extra teachers or translators.

At Swift, the new refugees receive a daily English lesson taught by a Bosnian teacher who came to Swift to work with an earlier wave of refugees and does not speak the languages of the new arrivals. The students are mainstreamed into regular classrooms the rest of the day.

Pyo, who did not speak English when she arrived, is the first to volunteer when the teacher calls on students to read aloud. When she finishes an assignment, she rushes to her teacher and points at her paper.

"Like this?" she asks.

She completes all of her homework, even if she's not quite sure what it's asking her to do. In her notebook, she wrote her favorite things are reading and ice cream.

But the timid child has a tough time understanding her teacher.

"The hardest thing for Pyo is that she cannot do what every other child can do -- and that's participate in all the lessons," said her teacher Rosemary Gabriel. "I look at her and see how she longs to be part of the group discussions. Over time, she will, but right now English is just too new for her."

The refugees have become an integral part of the mosaic at Swift. Despite the school's large immigrant population, nearly 80 percent of students passed the state achievement exams last year, surpassing city and state averages.

Pyo's father, Thee Da, knows it's important to push his daughter to do well in school.

"Life between educated and not educated is very different, especially life in America," he said through an interpreter. "Here, if you do not do well in school, it is hard to survive."

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sbanchero@tribune.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... 3037.story

That's what happens in SANCTUARY CITIES!!!!!!!! They get exactly what they ask for. If they bankrupt citizens, do they care? NOT NO, BUT H--- NO!!!!

The question is HOW MANY?

Can we help every poor person in the world?

The next question are we dumbing down our own to do this ?

I hope this doesn't sound cold but why are we doing this to our
own people?
Don't our kids deserve an education also?

I know you sure won't get one at Vegas schools right now

Its all the multi cult , diversity feel good stuff and if you
happen to speak English you are second class in their eyes

Thanks to all the stupidy of our left leaning bleeding heart greedy leaders, we are 'all' going down like the Titanic!

One of the biggest offenders that hardly gets the recognition it deserves is the left leaning lib symp policies of the last 50 years

If anyone deserves a huge part of the blame
there you go

"We love the diversity and we are so happy to have them, but we just weren't fully prepared for so many all at one time," said Harlee Till, principal at Swift,

Yeah right you love the diversity. What a load of crap.

Children who grow up witnessing abuse or being abused have a higher chance of becoming an abuser. What are these kids, who have witnessed all kinds of horrors, going to be like when they're older? Or will they be special and turn out just fine now that they're safe in the U.S.?

Children who grow up witnessing abuse or being abused have a higher chance of becoming an abuser. What are these kids, who have witnessed all kinds of horrors, going to be like when they're older? Or will they be special and turn out just fine now that they're safe in the U.S.?

Here is an article about a teenage boy from Bosnia that went on a killing spree in Utah, March 2007. He had supposedly witnessed fighting and upheaval.

Body of Teen Who Killed 5 in Salt Lake City Mall Buried in Native Bosnia
Sunday, March 04, 2007

Sulejman Talovic
SALT LAKE CITY — The teenager who killed five people in a U.S. shopping mall and died in a police shootout was buried Saturday in his native village in eastern Bosnia.

The father of Sulejman Talovic said his son "wounded the hearts of all our family" when he opened fire on Feb. 12 at the mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, killing five people and wounding four.

"I feel sorry for my child, but I also feel sorry for all the innocent people he has killed," the 18-year-old's father, Suljo Talovic, told The Associated Press.

Suljo Talovic spoke while standing where his family's house once stood in Talovici, an eastern Bosnian hamlet that still bears the scars of the 1992-95 war, including houses pocked with machine-gun fire or, like Talovic's, reduced to rubble by shelling.

Moments later, several hundred people gathered at the nearby cemetery for Sulejman's open-casket funeral. His crying mother, Sabira, collapsed after touching her son's face and was carried away.

Suljo Talovic said he would not make excuses for his son, but did not understand how a teenager could buy a gun in the United States.

"The authorities are guilty for not alerting us that he bought a gun. In the U.S., you cannot buy cigarettes if you are underaged, but you can buy a gun," he said.

The Talovic family had left for the United States in 1998 following years of violence and upheaval, after fighting broke out in 1992. Serb troops laid siege to Talovici, bombing it for a year before invading in March 1993.

Sulejman was just 4 when he, his three siblings, his mother Sabira and his grandfather fled on foot to Srebrenica, while his father Suljo hid in the mountains with other men from the village, relatives said.

Srebrenica was besieged, bombed and crowded with hungry Muslim families like the Talovics. One bomb killed Sulejman's grandfather. Sabira Talovic and the four children — rescued by the U.N. along with other displaced families — made their way to the government-controlled town of Tuzla, impoverished but safe.

Sulejman's father, meanwhile still in Srebrenica, narrowly survived the 1995 killing of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys there by Serb forces loyal to then-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. The Srebrenica massacre was Europe's worst since World War II.

The family reunited in Tuzla later that year when a peace agreement brought an end to the war. They later obtained Croatian citizenship and in 1998 joined relatives already living in Utah.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,256323,00.html

what bothers me about that is not that we help some refugees - but we put them in our school system without any thought by the federal gov't

School is NOT daycare - its a place to learn. These refugees cannot enter school and start learning - they dont know english and they have emotial issues. They need a special school just for them - we can throw them in our schools and expect them to fit right in and learn. It hurts the other kids in their education immensely because the resources then are not there.

We cannot treat our educational system like daycare, or worse refugee recovery centers and also expect all students to get an excellent education.

Its lack of thought on the federal gov'ts part.

I have huge respect for teachers, and we place too much burden on them.

Originally Posted by stealthwii

what bothers me about that is not that we help some refugees - but we put them in our school system without any thought by the federal gov't

School is NOT daycare - its a place to learn. These refugees cannot enter school and start learning - they dont know english and they have emotial issues. They need a special school just for them - we can throw them in our schools and expect them to fit right in and learn. It hurts the other kids in their education immensely because the resources then are not there.

We cannot treat our educational system like daycare, or worse refugee recovery centers and also expect all students to get an excellent education.

Its lack of thought on the federal gov'ts part.

I have huge respect for teachers, and we place too much burden on them.

The bad part is they throw them into our schools and its
our kids that are getting short changed on the deal