New school, new country, new life
Massive influx of children from Middle East strains German education system
BERLIN— Fadi and Fadiya started school in Berlin last month not knowing a word of German.
The 9-year-old twins from Syria are among nearly 400,000 children among a wave of up to 1 million migrants expected in Germany this year alone. All around the country, schools have added extra teachers and “welcome classes” to teach kids like Fadi and Fadiya the basics of German before they are integrated into regular classrooms six to eight months later.
As a new school year began last month, Berlin’s schools saw nonGerman-speaking children jump by 70 per cent. There are now 478 welcome classes in the capital alone for roughly 5,000 new refugee children.
Fadi and Fadiya’s school, located near their asylum home, will open a second welcome class in a few weeks, reflecting the massive demand for special schooling for refugee kids in Berlin and elsewhere.
The Associated Press was allowed into the classroom under an agreement not to publish the children’s family names to protect their privacy
Fadi, wearing an oversized SpiderMan hat, and his sister Fadiya, with a brown ponytail and big timid eyes, were among 20 new arrivals from 11 countries in the welcome class offered by an elementary school.
On Tuesday morning, teacher Sandra Wiandt, an energetic woman with a warm smile, taught them the days of the week, colours and au- tumn vocabulary.
The children, ages 6 to 12, came from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Korea, Ghana and the U.S. Not all were refugees. Some, for example, were children of parents who had relocated to Germany for work.
They got a first taste of the intricacies of the German language as they had to repeat differing singular and plural forms of words like chestnut, acorn and leaf, specimens of which they’d picked up on the schoolyard the day before.
Fadi pointed insecurely at a basket full of leaves, carefully uttering the German word for them: “blaetter.” Fadiya shyly handed the teacher a painting she had drawn: a portrait of a girl with long, dangling earrings and a floor-length dress.
Some of the children were alert and quick to remember the words, while others were withdrawn or detached overall.
Afew got up in the middle of lessons and wandered aimlessly through the classroom.
“Some of those kids have never seen a school from the inside because they spent years hiding in basements from bombs,” said principal Irina Wissmann. “But we’re trying to get them used to our routines as quickly as possible; it’s the best thing that can happen to them right now.”
Because of their backgrounds, however, many present special challenges. Among the current group of students is a Syrian boy who doesn’t participate much in class, but constantly kneads little figures out of Play-Doh and draws men lying buried in the ground under big trees.
“We had one child who would hide under the desk during the lesson and scream in panic, scaring off all the other kids as well,” Wissmann, the principal, said.
Civil wars and political upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa are preventing more than 13 million children from going to school, according to a report released by UNICEF last month. Children from Syria, in the middle of a civil war, are especially affected. Even if their families manage to escape to refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey or Lebanon, more than 700,000 Syrian refugee children cannot attend school there because those countries’ overburdened schools cannot cope with the extra students, the UN said.
Germany, by comparison, is well off, but it still struggles with the massive influx of new children.
The teacher Wiandt, who started her welcome class this year, said the experience so far has been rewarding.. She said that for the children, school is a “protected place.”
Still, because of their situation as newcomers, even that security may eventually be shattered, Wissmann said.
“Sometimes a child’s seat stays empty in the morning,” she said. “And when we call up the refugee home we find out the family was relocated or deported overnight.”
“Some of those kids have never seen a school from the inside because they spent years hiding in basements from bombs.” IRINA WISSMANN SCHOOL PRINCIPAL