In 2004, about 40 students from Africa showed up at the doors of the school.
Most were Somali Bantu - and had just arrived in the United States after spending years living in refugee camps in Kenya.
Unlike other immigrants or refugees whose main challenge might be that they don’t speak English, the Somali students didn’t know how to read or write in any language.
This fall, they face a critical test of how much they've learned since they arrived. As we hear from Amy Quinton, for the first time, these African students must attend mainstream academic classes.
(Okay students we’re starting with this paper)
On the third floor of Central High School, about a half dozen Somali students wait for their instructions in a writing class.
Look around the classroom, the boys look like typical teenagers wearing T-shirts and jeans.
But it’s the Somali girls that stand out -- in their long flowing gold, blue and red dresses, and veils that cover them from head to toe.
(1012 1:43Droney- the first thing you are going to do is write the vocabulary for the pictures that you see, okay, name, write the vocabulary)
(“This one is easy Ms.â€)
As soon as writing teacher Sheila Droney gives them instructions, the have questions about the pictures they see on the papers in front of them.
Some raise their hands, others just shout.
Droney visits almost every student’s desk individually.
(What does that say..what can you see when it is dir, dark…okay, so which of these things do you see when it’s dark…you can see the flowers?)
When is it dark, Ms. I don’t, Is it dark outside right now, maybe)
Most Somali students at Central will tell you that learning English is their most important goal.
Somali Student Abdifatah Bashir arrived at Central in March of last year.
He’s 19 years old and married -- but you wouldn’t know that by looking at him.
Abdifatah is short and of slight build, and looks much younger.
Wearing a navy T-shirt and blue jeans, Abdifatah sits at a round table holding a book that he’s eager to read.
1056 :57 This is my favorite book, he’s talking about eggs something about train and boat..DO YOU WANT TO READ A LITTLE BIT? Yeah, I read a little bit (reads from Green Eggs and Ham)
Abdifatah has come a long way considering he didn’t even recognize letters or numbers when he arrived.
Illiteracy is widespread in Somalia – the country had no official written language until 1972.
Abdifatah used to work 12 hour days as a farmer in Somalia before he was forced to flee that country’s civil war.
He then spent three years struggling to survive in a refugee camp in Kenya.
Abdifatah is doing well and making strides at Central.
But when he wants to say something really important, he speaks his native language, Somali, and uses an interpreter.
1052 1:36 I have to work hard and study hard, when I see in the streets everybody speaks English, if you don’t speak the language that is a big challenge and that’s something that I have to overcome.
///
June (they came here with 16, 17, 18 years of knowledge, it just wasn’t literate knowledge, it wasn’t knowledge based on literacy..
June Rojas Tumblin directs Central’s English Language Learner Department.
She says when the Somali students arrived at Central in large numbers in 2004, the school was caught completely off guard.
They had no program in place for how to teach older students who had never even picked up a pencil or known which way to hold a book.
No other school districts in the state had any ideas either.
Central High administrators visited programs in Virginia and Maine and wrote a curriculum from scratch.
(no one was really sure how to take a human being who was at 17 18 and 19 and get in them in a very small amount of time, education that was nine ten eleven years in the making for the rest of us.)
The school has a very small amount of time.
Manchester Central has only two years to get students like Abdifatah ready for classes at the 9th grade level.
More on the reasons for that deadline in a moment.
But during those two years, the Somali students move among a small set of classrooms on the third floor in what is called grade 13.
In one of those classrooms, next door to Tumblin’s office, math teacher Jerry Coffey is teaching a new course the school created called Literacy Math.
Here, students are struggling to learn their numbers, how to add, subtract and multiply.
(sally receives 5 hundred a week for allowance, okay sally receives five dollars a week for allowance, what’s allowance?)
There’s just so much these refugees have to learn.
Whether it’s spotting the difference between five dollars and 500-dollars, or knowing the definition of an allowance.
Teacher Jerry Coffey spent the first ten minutes of class trying to explain that a suspension is not a holiday.
(what happens to their grade? Zero.. mr Coffey, they get zeros or F’s, what happens when you get zero’s or F’s (silence) Nothing happens you just get little zero…Nothing happens I don’t understand)
//
(1007 :40 I guess the part that keeps me going, I understand that these students have the most need, and trying to figure out and help these students figure out where they’re going to fit into society is an interesting project for me.
Grade 13 teachers like Jerry Coffey say they enjoy the freedom to respond to the students and reshape the curriculum as they go along.
Teachers often find themselves serving as guides and advisors to Somali students trying to adapt to American culture.
They’ve replaced the Somali girls’ sandals with warm shoes for New Hampshire winters.
They’ve worked with Somali Bantu tribal elders to resolve conflicts between some of the students.
But for all the work they do, writing teacher Sheila Droney says it’s not enough.
Most of her Somali students will likely never catch up to their American peers.
Droney (they have poor writing skills, even their handwriting is like a first grader who’s just learning how to really control the pencil and write on the line, it looks really shaky and scratchy, for a lot of them, not for all of them, so you look at this handwriting and you think, Oh my God, this can’t be high school
Regardless, this fall these students are expected to do 9th grade level work.
Coffey predicts many of the refugees will fail.
1008 basically you get these kids when they’re in literacy you can take as much time as you want to try and get some basic concepts with them, but then once they go into a straight class that has certain objectives they have to meet, many of them could just be getting F’s and I can’t see how that’s productive because certainly they recognize what an F is, and that could actually cause them to be frustrated and drop out of school
So why do these students have to move on to ninth grade when teachers clearly believe that most are not ready??
Before the Somalis arrived, the Manchester school district was in trouble with Washington for failing to get non-English speaking students up to speed.
The result was a formal consent agreement.
No student can be kept in a completely separate program, like Grade 13, for more than two years.
Manchester ELL Coordinator Maureen Richardson says it was a compromise.
1387 1:15 (I don’t know if two years is enough, but I don’t know if five years would be enough, I just think that there’s a danger in saying we’re going to have a parallel program without giving someone the opportunity to rise to the challenge in the mainstream)
But the two year policy never anticipated students like the Somali Bantus, who came to Manchester with no formal education.
And for these unexpected students other unexpected consequences are lurking farther down the road.
If and when they earn enough credits to be considered high school sophomores, they’ll be subject to the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The law says high school sophomores must take standardized tests.
But teachers and administrators say testing this particular group of students won’t help them or the Manchester School District.
1109 :53 it’s a tough test for any of us to take but that child is going to have to be successful on reading and math
ELL department head June Tumblin.
and if that human brain after two and a half years of education in this language, that was never literate in the first place, is not successful in that tenth grade test, the district is held accountable.
Low test scores among ELL students are a factor in the district’s being labeled “in need of improvement†under the No Child Left Behind law.
Central High School has the largest number of refugees and immigrants in the district.
Some of the Somali students understand that they need more education to catch up with their peers.
Abdifatah is one of them.
1058 :20 My dream is when I finish school that’s what I dream everyday, that I will get a job and I will finish college one day, get my degree from a college.
But long before college, Abdifatah’s teachers first hope that he will make it through the more demanding high school classes that he’ll be taking this fall.
I’m Amy Quinton.
