Helping refugee students navigate American life
Is America a melting pot or a collection of individuals from around the globe living at cross purposes? We tend to inhabit an unstable place between these two possibilities, embracing the mythology of an arms-wide-open America but shunning its reality. Successive waves of immigrants have sparked virulent backlash: Chinese, Irish, Italian, Central American, African, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, you name it.
Roger C. Sullivan High School in Chicago has been a landing pad for immigrant and refugee students for a century. In addition to Chicago natives, Sullivan’s student body includes a polyglot (more than 30 languages) mixture of young people. Motivated by Donald Trump’s election and the protests against his ban on travel from certain Muslim-majority nations, journalist Elly Fishman spent three and a half years reporting what would become “Refugee High: Coming of Age in America,” her absorbing account of Sullivan’s 2017-18 school year.
To develop her story, Fishman interviews Sullivan teachers and administrators, as well as students and their families. She highlights families from Iraq; Guatemala; Congo via Nyarugusu, a refugee camp in Kigoma, Tanzania; Myanmar; and Syria. On the staff side, Fishman features Chad Adams, Sullivan’s principal; Sarah Quintenz, director of the school’s Englishlanguage learner program; and several others. “Refugee High” is organized around the months of the school year.
To arrive from a Rohingya refugee camp, or a camp in Tanzania, often with no English, and plunge into this intense microcosm of American life is a mind-bending prospect. Fishman does a wonderful job reminding us that even with their myriad, harrowing traumas, these students are kids. They live in the throes of teenage-hood, meaning acne and Rihanna. They are captivated by America’s alluring pop culture, the latest fashions and social media. They worry about homework. They angst over romance, use and sell illegal substances, and struggle with the school’s complex and all-important social life and its unwritten hierarchies.
Fishman ferries readers into these students’ apartments, many of which are sparsely furnished. We meet parents who have suffered unspeakable tragedy and dislocation, and now grapple with grueling night work, and low or no pay. They mourn the loss of everything they once knew, including family and friends.
Every high school needs a Sarah Quintenz, who updates the English-language learner curriculum because “what worked for Nepalese students didn’t always work for Syrian kids.” Far more than an academic adviser, Quintenz is an unflappable, endlessly creative, tireless advocate for her students. She holds them accountable while offering unconditional love.
Quintenz teaches them how to trick or treat on Halloween and organizes a mouthwatering international Thanksgiving where students arrive with dishes cooked at home. “I am from Ghana,” one student reads from a poem prepared for the occasion. “We live a peaceful life and eat fufu, which is made from … plantain.” From the Syrian dish of maqlubeh to Somali sambusas to the Pakistani fast food brought by a Rohingya boy, this Thanksgiving meal nourishes in more ways than one.
Quintenz’s classroom is the “womb” where lovesick students find a tender listen as well as stern advice on birth control. Quintenz has been known to wash students’ uniforms when a laundromat is unaffordable and take kids to the DMV to qualify for driver’s licenses — no small feat for non-Americans.
In embarking on her research, Fishman aimed to answer four questions: “What does [the] political shift mean for refugees and immigrants who made it off the plane? What kind of America will they inhabit? What kind of America will they help build? And how will America take shape around them?”
“Refugee High” may not provide the answers, but it contains important messages. “Refugee High” showcases a school that not only serves as a welcoming landing pad for immigrants and refugees, but also as a launching pad for talented, productive, future generations of Americans. Students can be heroes, too.