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Refugee Children in the Classroom: Anca’s Story
My first year as a classroom teacher was very different from what I had been expecting. The school that had hired me was in North Hollywood, its own city in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. And even though the school was surrounded by well kept homes on tree-lined streets few of the students at my new school lived in them. Instead, my kids lived in the apartments several blocks away on crowded, noisy streets that weren’t always safe. It was also my introduction to teaching refugee children in the classroom.
Not quite bilingual and armed with a Spanish-English dictionary I welcomed my new students into the fifth and sixth grade combination I was assigned to in the summer of 1986. Much to my surprise and dismay it turned out only five of my thirty-eight students were Spanish speaking, and one of them had set a goal of only speaking English at school. The remaining thirty five kids spoke some dialect of Romanian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Russian, Polish, Armenian, or Farsi, and two spoke Hebrew and English but were not allowed to speak English at home. I placed my Spanish-English dictionary on the bookshelf behind my desk and there it sat for the entire school year. With not one native English speaker on my roster I knew I had my work cut out for me that first school year.
