Learning to be Americans
Dozens of refugees attend Chicago’s Sullivan High, where hijabs are as common as high-tops, said Elly Fishman. Teachers say the presence of so many foreign-born students has given the once failing school a new purpose.
S ARAH QUINTENZ IS running late. She is due in the front office for a new student enrollment, but first she needs to find someone who speaks Arabic. Second period has just ended, so the teacher scans the crowded hallway outside her first-floor classroom. Finally, she spots a Syrian-born student down the corridor. She shouts to him, telling him to follow her to the office. When they get there, a small crowd has already gathered. At the center stands 14-year-old Mohammad Naser. Quintenz doesn’t know the particulars of his story, just that he and his family fled Iraq. They have been in the United States for all of three weeks. He is flanked by an older brother and a 4-year-old sister, who can’t stop giggling. A representative of the refugee resettlement agency Heartland Alliance accompanies them. “Hi. How are you?” Quintenz asks. Mohammad smiles, bewildered. Quintenz plows ahead: “Are you nervous? Scared?” The Syrian student begins to translate, but Quintenz cuts him off: “I need to know if he speaks any English.” It only takes a few seconds to assess that Mohammad doesn’t. “He’s 1A,” Quintenz proclaims to the school counselor nearby. The conversation continues, Quintenz relying on the Syrian student and Daniel Rizk, an AmeriCorps tutor conversant in Arabic, to translate. “Tell him it’s really important that he get here right at 8 a.m.,” Quintenz says. “Actually, tell him to get here at 7:50.” The next several minutes are spent showing Mohammad his two uniforms—a T-shirt and a polo with the school’s logo— the Wi-Fi password, and his schedule. Something makes Mohammad and the Syrian boy laugh. “See? They’re already friends,” Quintenz says to no one in particular. She then asks if Mohammad has a ride to school tomorrow. “We need to make sure he has a way here, because we’re filled up on students getting lost on their first day.” Quintenz says her goodbyes, and as she’s leaving, Mohammad turns to Rizk and asks him a question in Arabic. Rizk points to the insignia on the tile floor. “Sullivan,” he answers. “This is Sullivan High School.” If Sullivan High School had a motto, it would be “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Its immigrant population now numbers close to 300—45 percent of the school’s 641 students— and many are refugees new to this country. This academic year alone, the school in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood has welcomed a staggering 89 refugees—nearly three times as many as last year and far more than any other high school in the city. The recent surge, fueled in part by an influx of Syrians, has turned the school into a global melting pot, with 38 countries and more than 35 languages represented. The third most common language, after English and Spanish, spoken at Sullivan? Swahili. How Sullivan got to this point is a fascinating story of a school that not long ago was struggling for survival. When Chad Adams stepped in as principal in 2013, the school had been on academic probation for eight years running, its four-year graduation rate hovered at a woeful 54 percent, classrooms were barely half full, and violent incidents were common. “It was a place you wouldn’t want to send your kids,” says Adams, 40. But when Adams first walked through the school’s doors that July, he ran into a group of students participating in a summer program for refugees. “I had never really met kids from all over the world before,” he says. “You get to know these kids and you see that they have an appreciation for a free education that sometimes Americans take for granted. It was really profound to me.” He filed that experience away and spent his first year observing how the school operated. He noticed a large number of older kids who were regular no-shows. So at the end of his first year, he pushed them out, moving them to alternative schools and GED programs. “What’s your motivation to come to school as an 18-year-old with three credits? Your motivation is to hang out and mess around.” Since Chicago Public Schools had already allocated funds based on projected enrollment, Adams now had some extra cash to play with. He decided to pour it into the school’s English Language Learner program (ELL), designed for refugees and other immigrants who speak little or no English. In essence, he was creating a new mission for the school. Still, keeping up with shifts in refugee populations presents a constant challenge for Adams and his staff. New foreign conflicts create new crops of students. What worked for a heavily Bhutanese population (there were some 90 such students in the school when Adams took over) may not work with Syrian kids. “We’re struggling a little bit in the sense that I don’t know exactly how to manage this, but when you see a number like that going up, you know you have to do something,” says Adams. “There is no other place in the world that is doing what we are doing. I mean, this is like what America might be in 50 years.” A S STUDENTS TRICKLE in just before 12:30 p.m., Sarah Quintenz’s classroom is a cacophony of languages— Arabic, French, Rohingya, Swahili, Urdu. Nearly every inch of wall is covered in flags, posters, or photos of students. Plastic globes hang from the lights, and pictures of Quintenz’s young son dot the walls, each one accompanied with a direction, such as “Clean up after yourself, your mother doesn’t work here!” or “Don’t be afraid to swim in the deep end.”