Refugee children arrive with a backpack full of psychological issues from having lived in harsh environments where they witnessed abuse and violence or victimized themselves. They suffered starvation and deprivation. They don't have anything or anyplace to call their own. They can't express what they've seen or felt.

"How can we even wrap our heads around what they've been through?" Brady asks.

Port of Entry

Brady goes with a soft and simple approach with her students. Nearly every object in her classroom at Northwest Middle School has a label. "Doorknob" on the doorknob. "Door" on the door. "Shelf" on the shelf.

Pictures, phrases and numbers cover the walls. Tacked near the door is a list of the days of the week in English, Spanish, Russian, Farsi and Arabic.

A CD of chakra healing chants provides soothing background noise. The label reads, "Ideal for yoga, sacred dance and the healing arts."

And apparently for junior high ESL.

"It's the perfect antithesis of middle school," says Brady, known to her students as Miss Ellie.

Brady's class is the perfect antithesis of many a Utah classroom: There's not a white kid in the bunch.

"My class is port-of-entry," Brady said. "If they speak no English, they come to me."

On this day, students from Afghanistan, Liberia, Mexico, Somalia, Sudan and Vietnam sat at round tables reading a book titled "I Feel Silly Today and Other Moods That Make My Day." Most of them are refugees who have lived in the United States for about a year.

"Today my mood is great, it's absolutely the best," 13-year-old Bakar Eftin reads aloud with help from a volunteer tutor.

One of the characters in the book has curly hair. Bakar doesn't know what curly means. The tutor explained the difference by pointing to a classmate with straight hair and back to the black, tightly wound hair on his head.

"Curly is like that?" he asked, twisting his finger in his closely cropped 'do.

Eight months ago he lived in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. A Somali Bantu, he cannot read or write his native language because it is not written. But he and his peers are picking up English in leaps and bounds.

"They're growing three to four years in a year," Brady said. "If mainstream kids grow three to four years in a year, they're in ELP (Extended Learning Program), they're in honors, they're pushed to the university."

Making the grade

College might be possible for Eftin and his refugee classmates because they are in junior high. They still have a shot at a high school diploma.