Charter recruits refugees

Two flies play tag around Ali Abdiraham's head. One buzzes to a stop on the collar of his nearly new, navy polo shirt, but the 8-year-old doesn't flinch. Ali's attention — and that of the rest of his family of eight (minus the baby, who is busily munching on Dad's keys) — is riveted on the homework assignment in front of him.

Dad smiles anxiously as a woman from Ali's school explains, slowly, stressing her enunciation, that a parent should point at each word as the third-grader reads it aloud. Mom nods in affirmation, but she looks uncertain. Even Ali is a little confused — and he has to translate the conversation for his parents, who came to West Valley City from Kenya as refugees just five years ago.

"It's difficult sometimes," said Katherine Findlay, refugee outreach coordinator for American Preparatory Academy. "Not only are we trying to communicate with people from a different culture, who speak a different language, but we have to depend on an 8-year-old to connect us."

Difficult, however, is exactly what Findlay signed up for when she took a job recruiting refugee families for American Prepatory Academy's second campus — The School for New Americans. The charter school, which opened its first set of doors in affluent, largely Caucasian Draper, chose its West Valley City site specifically to attract students like Ali who could use a leg up in education. Fifty percent of the school's student body are refugees and immigrants.

The problems that arise in a multicultural, multilingual classroom are not foreign to Utah public schools — thousands of refugee children, often vibrantly visible in traditional garb and head scarves, flood the hallways of schools in Granite, Salt Lake and Jordan school districts. Solutions to the issue of fitting refugee children into mainstream education, however, are as varied as the nationalities — Somalian, Burmese, Iraqi, Nepalese — that the school districts serve.

Until three weeks ago, when The School for New Americans opened, refugee families in Utah didn't get to choose which solution they thought might best help their children. They did, as most have done since they came to this country at the mercy of refugee resettlement programs, exactly what they were told.

"The hardest part of recruiting kids for the school is getting the parents to understand that they have a choice," Findlay said. "They've never had to deal with that before."