Group aims to bridge gap for immigrant students
Summer camps help youths acclimate
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Unlike Tanzania, Pittsburgh has a hockey team. Unlike in Congo, it snows. A small group of students sat at a table in a third-floor classroom in the Pittsburgh Musical Theater this week, discussing the diagrams they had drawn and taped to the wall. They were comparing their home countries — Benin, Sierra Leone, Yemen and Iraq — to their new city and giving presentations to their classmates, with gentle encouragementfrom a camp counselor.
Even the most hesitant among them joined an enthusiastic conversation about whether Pittsburgh or Africa has better food. (Each of them had a different opinion about that.)
“We focus, I think, a lot on building confidence,” said Isabelle Ouyang, a University of Pittsburgh student and one of the directors of the Pittsburgh Refugee Youth Summer Enrichment — or PRYSE — Academy. “So students feel good practicingand expressing themselves.”
PRYSE, a summer camp for middleand high-school-age immigrant or refugee children from across Allegheny County, aims to help them learn English and keep up with academic work during the summer break, but also to help them celebrate their cultural identities and expressthemselves in a new city.
Each session of the program lasts three weeks, Monday through Friday, at a theater in the West End. Mornings are reserved for academic work and afternoons are spent working on art projects or participating in enrichmentexercises.
On Wednesday, the roughly 30 students who regularly attend the second session of the summer split into three groups and spent their morning discussing their projects. After a snack break, the students moved outside for a quick game of soccer before they took a field trip to the Mattress Factory art museum on the North Side.
“I play with my friends, I love the teachers,” said 12-year-old Cristian, who will be a seventh-grader at Brentwood Middle School this year. His family moved to Pittsburgh a year and a half ago from Colombia, via Ecuador. “It’s one of the best camps that I have.”
Leaders of the camp asked that the students’ last names not be used for safety reasons.
Counselors said the students’ backgrounds vary. Some of them have grown up in Pittsburgh and speak fluent English, while others have been in the United States for only a few months. They range in age from 12 to 18, although older students can participate in the camp’s bridge-to-college program and work on skills like essay writing that are valuable in a higher education classroom.
They come from all across Allegheny County, but many of them are students in Pittsburgh. Most of them are referred to the camp either by a teacher or the resettlement agency working with their family. It’s free for them to attend.
“School isn’t [always] really a place for them to feel OK with where they’re at,” Ms. Ouyang said. But at the PRYSE camps, there are no grades and there is no pressure, she said.
The summer camp is the flagship program for the Alliance for Refugee Youth Support and Education, the umbrella organization that runs the program. The nonprofit was founded six years ago by Jenna Baron, who at that time was in her senior year at the University of Pittsburgh. She was tutoring a boy from a refugee family, and noticed that he was struggling with his schoolwork, not just because of a language barrier, but because of other challenges as well.
Some of the students who come to the program spent time in refugee camps, or their education was disrupted because they moved, Ms. Baron said. Some of the students are the first in their families to have any formal education at all.
The Alliance and the PRYSE camps were her way of creating an experience for those students in which they could work on their schoolwork and English skills but also make friends and talk about their challenges and build their