This article in the Plain Dealer is pretty much a boiler-plate article about the “challenge” faced by a school district, and in this case a particular school, to educate a flood of third world children who come from cultures where school is not part of their lives. I always wonder what is happening to the other city kids in these schools when teachers must integrate illiterate children at all grade levels.
Helping the newcomers get acclimated is a stiff challenge. Teachers say it takes up to seven years to proficiently read and think in an unfamiliar language, particularly one with so many words that sound alike or carry double meanings.
Aides translate in African or Asian languages that Gallagher teachers don’t speak, but sometimes concepts have to be conveyed by pointing at objects or drawing pictures.
So, for example, what are the other students doing when a teacher is pointing at a pencil and saying, “pencil” to a 5th grader?
Catholic Charities resettled this particular group of refugees (as a federal government contractor!) and says essentially, we are finished with them at 3-6 months.
The federal government and Catholic Charities support the refugees for three to six months, after which they have to find work or other support. Families get by with the aid of food stamps, donated furniture and hand-me-down clothes. Employment may be spotty. Many are without cars. They may have to shift to run-down housing.
School nurses work to get the families on Medicaid, or find them primary doctors and eye and dental care. That keeps them from depending on hospital emergency rooms.
In fact the refugees should be getting up to 8 months of outright government aid and they are eligible for all forms of welfare for years. Besides there is no law that says Catholic Charities can’t help them for years, or as long as it takes, with their own privately raised funds. How many refugees do you think Catholic Charities would resettle if they had to do it without your tax dollars, without the lucrative grants and contracts they have from the State Department and the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services?
No melting here! Somalis have said they won’t be melting either.
Bill Merriman is a deacon at St. Patrick Catholic Church on Bridge Avenue, where he assists Liberians who live in the surrounding neighborhoods. Stephanie Pritts of Lakewood works as a volunteer among Somalis through Cleveland’s Community of St. Malachi parish.
They say the Africans retain much of their nomadic, tribal ways. Order and responsibility sometimes get lost in the shuffle as families mix freely and fill their rental homes with stepfathers, aunts, uncles and half-brothers. Children may spend days at the houses of kin, or leave during a school week for a family gathering in another city.
Pritts said the Somali women are warm and welcoming but are relegated by male-dominated tradition to cooking, giving birth and watching the children. The mothers tend to be illiterate. Helping with homework, science projects or going to the library are not in the routine. Academically, the children are on their own.
“They bring notes home from school, no one can read it,” Pritts said. “There’s no understanding that they have to support that effort.”
This article reminded me of the Cloward/Piven Strategy, a strategy Obama learned well at Columbia University. Nancy Coppock in American Thinker:
The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.