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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 30, 2015)
Page 4 News Street Roots • January 30-February 5, 2015 I The Somali community * is the third largest immigrant community in Portland Public Schools, but it’s still waiting for district to find a better way to teach its failing youth Sòmali community out en masse, asking PPS to teach its youth in a more effective way. Last year PPS officials told Somali parents that the two predominant Somali languages might be up .next for a dual language immersion program - a program that’s been proven to be the most effective means of teaching non-native English speakers in U.S. public schools. This news generated a lot of excitement among community members. Studies show children in dual language programs generally do much better academically in the long run than English speaking students who are not in dual language programs. PPS has dual language immersion classes in Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin - languages that have a higher demand among English-speaking students that fill half the seats in a dual language classroom. These language programs start in kindergarten and go through elementary school, teaching both English and a foreign language to a classroom filled with native speakers of both languages. Each year, less and less of the foreign language is taught. While there are other languages among immigrant students that are not represented in this special language program, Somali is the most commonly spoken. n October, Musse Olol, chairman of the Somali American Council of Oregon,. encouraged the PPS Board of Education to support a Somali dual language immersion program within its system. He addressed the board sayingthe problcius with S o in a ii— youth are originating in PPS. “I’ve seen today kids that are in the system, that are prone to fail. Especially our male youth are going to the justice system directly. In _ Seattle we have about 300 youngsters in the jail system there, and Portland is going in that direction if you don’t reverse,” Olol says. Olol says the program Would not only benefit children who don’t speak English, it would also help Somali youth who were born in the U.S. to communicate better with their parents and older relatives, and help them to appreciate their families’ culture - making their roots and the language spoken at home an asset, not something to be ashamed of. Michael Bacon, PPS assistant director of the Dual Language Immersion Program says studies show students who read and write well in their first language perform better academically and learn a second language much faster. He was hoping to propose a Somali dual language program to the board of education this month, but a feasibility study conducted by PPS revealed major barriers. However, on Jan. 20 — instead of proposing the program originally presented to the Somali community — Bacon and Debbie Armendariz, interim director of PPS Dual Language Immersion Program, proposed the creation of a native language literacy program. This program works like ESL. Students would be pulled out of regular classes to learn how to read and write in their native language for part of the day in addition to being pulled out to learn English for another part of the day. The Somali language lessons would also be used I Batula Mohamud grew up in a refugee camp in Kenya. When she was placed into ninth grade after immigrating to, the U.S., she didn’t know how to , write her name. She wasn’t able to graduate from high school, but was be accepted into a program at Portland Community College’s Southeast Campus that allowed her to continue her studies without a diploma. She hopes to graduate with an Associate’s in 2016. PH O TO BY EMILY .GREEN BY EM ILY GREEN English as a Second Language, or ESL, classes, usually taught by teachers who speak only English. Statistics show that atula Mohamud can’t tell you her age. among language programs, the basic, On paper she’s 26, but she says she’s federally mandated ESL has the lowest long most likely younger - probably 22 or term success rate. Mohamud attended high 23 years old. She was born in Somalia but school for four years and left after finishing was forced to flee the country with her her senior year without a diploma. mother and siblings when she was a baby to Sheww never had a teacher who spoke escape the ongoing conflict. For most of her her language. childhood, she lived in the arid, eastern There are nearly 500 Somali youth region of Kenya at the Dadaab Refugee currently attending Portland Public Schools Camp, about 100 miles from the Somali (PPS), and since 2010, they’ve combined to border. She survived in the camp by make the district’s third largest immigrant cleaning dwellings and selling water to community, behind Hispanics and Somali shop owners in the mornings and Vietnamese. More than half don’t speak any working in the garden and delivering food rations to other residents of the camp in the English, and some had little, if any, formal education prior to moving to the U.S. This afternoons. When she immigrated to the U.S. in 2004 is especially true of the most recent wave of Somali immigrants. Many children in this at the estimated age of 15, Mohamud group were born in refugee camps in Kenya couldn’t even write her first name. Despite and, like Mohamud, never attended school. her lack of any formal education, she was In addition, few have parents with the placed in a ninth-grade classroom. education necessary to help them with their In the U.S., immigrant children are homework. expected to assimilate. Federal law requires Only 22 percent of Somali students in they get pulled out of class each day to take STAFF W R IT E R B Portland schools meet or exceed state reading standards, and only 12 percent meet or exceed state mathematics standards. In 2013, out of 25 Somali youth in Portland who made it to their senior year, only nine graduated with a regular high school diploma. The result, say members of the Somali commumty, is that the schools act more like a pipeline to prison than a means of education. Their kids struggle and then drop out. Many join gangs and start using drugs. Speaking through a translator, Somali refugee Nuur Abdi says that he has two daughters in Southwest Portland’s Wilson High School. He says it’s difficult for them because no teacher at their school speaks their native language, and they don’t get much help because they aren’t fluent in English. “One out of five Somali makes it to college. Their education goes down, and they look for jobs in warehouses, jobs with no experience needed, no future. If they’re lucky they might get a GED,” Abdi says. The language situation has brought the See SOMALI, page 5
