How One Grassroots Organization is Meeting Pandemic-Driven School Challenges for Refugees
During the pandemic, organizations like Refugee Assistance Alliance have the unique opportunity to respond to the virtual learning challenges of refugee kids, even if imperfectly.
This is the second in a series of OpEds published by Hello Neighbor Network members. Jamie Everett, Director of Operations at Refugee Assistance Alliance, provided us with the following OpEd about how her organization is facing the challenges of virtual schooling head-on.
No parent will ever forget March of 2020.
The coronavirus pandemic started off with a bang, leaving parents everywhere scrambling to figure out how to work while having their kids suddenly at home, how to navigate endless virtual learning programs, and how to keep their families safe as the information unfolded. Having my kid work in the next room over from me all day long has become my new norm. It’s a good thing he’s cute.
The spring wasn’t the only challenge for parents. Here in South Florida, the fall brought online retailers selling out of desks, crashing district learning platforms, and political funding battles. Although many kids across the country have returned to physical school for at least a few days a week, some schools are already having to shut back down, and the first group of kids was already sent into quarantine at my son’s school. There are months of virtual learning and schedule changes to come. At Refugee Assistance Alliance, where I serve as one of the directors, the vast majority of kids in our program haven’t been in physical school since March.
Refugee families live among us, and they could use a hand.
Until a few years ago, the U.S. had one of the most robust refugee resettlement programs in the world. As you can imagine, refugees from around the world need some help getting the hang of their new land and culture. There is a lot to be learned about why refugee resettlement matters, but the bottom line is that being a resettled refugee isn’t easy, and the pandemic has only exacerbated that fact.
In the Miami area, most refugees are from Cuba and other Spanish-speaking countries. Understandably, most refugee assistance is done in Spanish, not to mention that you can buy a car, rent a house, see your doctor, and pay your bills in Spanish down here. But if you don’t speak English, Spanish (or even Haitian Creole) in South Florida, you won’t find a community that reflects your culture or your language. For this reason, refugees from Asia, Africa and the Middle East have told us through both laughter and tears that they don’t feel “settled” or “self sufficient” at all after their initial official resettlement period of three months is up. Refugee Assistance Alliance (RAA) came into existence for those families.
Established in 2017, RAA runs a variety of programs to assist refugee families from Asia, Africa and the Middle East who have been resettled into Miami-Dade or Broward counties. We consider it an honor to welcome them as our new neighbors, and aim to help them navigate their life here since they do not have an established community. The majority of the families in our program are from Syria, having fled the Syrian Civil War. Their daily lives are a challenge, to say the least. Imagine trying to help your kids with their English homework when all you speak is Arabic. RAA responds with Women’s Empowerment programming, practical needs assistance, K-12 school assistance, GED preparation, and more. Up until March of 2020, RAA ran a Homework Assistance Help Line, where kids could write in for homework and project help from volunteer tutors. Beyond that, (and helping kids apply for community educational programs and offering fun kid’s activities), we didn’t need to do more for them, school-wise. Everything changed when the pandemic hit.
Virtual schooling challenges are exacerbated for refugees.
In South Florida’s school districts, school information comes to families in English and Spanish, mainly. While kids pick up new languages relatively quickly, most of the parents struggle to learn English from their native Arabic, Tigrinya, Dari, or other languages. They cannot or can only partially understand the school and district’s directives regarding Coronavirus policies and virtual learning procedures. Additionally, many of the parents we assist do not have high digital literacy, or high educations themselves (though this can vary greatly, as many refugees are highly accomplished). Some of the parents in our program are illiterate. Some of the fathers work three jobs. Many have large families with three, or even five, kids. All have only the one laptop that RAA gifted them. And one toddler accidentally spilled water on the family’s laptop, so was down to phones only.
Where some families worry about internet bandwidth, a refugee family may worry about having internet at all. Where some families struggle to upload their child’s work onto the school’s portal, a refugee family may struggle with how to access the portal at all. Where some families need a parent to guide their child in understanding their virtual work, a refugee may need an English-speaking tutor (or three) to take over that role for all of their kids entirely.
When the schools went abruptly remote, the vast majority of RAA’s children did not understand what was happening. Their parents turned to us for help with questions that ranged from “What is the Coronavirus?” to “How does my child find their teacher?” One kid, who happens to be the same age as my own child and liked to run around with him at pre-Covid events, called me on a Sunday night to ask, “Miss Jamie, do I go back to school tomorrow or not?” Many school messages had been sent home (in English and Spanish), but he honestly did not know.
I knew that once remote school started, there would be dozens of kids in our program who were unable to access school. I knew that their parents would be confused and worried. How could they understand, when even my native-born teacher friends weren’t sure what was about to happen?
Sometimes you just need to jump.
Working for a non-profit organization that helps refugee families, it’s my job to oversee the needs of at least 100 refugees at any given time, which includes about 50 school-aged children (53% of refugees are children, after all). We anticipated that remote schooling would require that we pivot our programming, navigate each family’s novel and unique needs, and mount a robust response. Otherwise, most of our kids would have their schooling severely interrupted. Refugee kids have already had their educations interrupted, when they fled, lived in camps, traveled here, etc., and we vowed to do everything we could not to let that happen again.
The relationships that we already had with each family enabled us to predict needs. By the Monday following school closures, I sent out an emergency call for volunteer school tutors across several platforms, asking them to work virtually with a child. Volunteers came flooding in. Parents were texting me. Kids were sitting at home trying to pull up their student portal on a family cell phone. There was no time to raise money, write a grant, set up program evaluation standards, or put this into our Board’s three-year plan (all of which underline non-profit work). We were in triage mode, and we simply jumped in with both feet.
I dropped all of the other programs I oversee down to the bare bones, and got to work onboarding new volunteer tutors and assigning them to families, while keeping my eye on various district guidelines, learning how to access student portals and teacher platforms, communicating with parents, and trying to set in motion a bigger plan to help us keep everything under control.
Thanks to the willingness of our Executive Director [Kristen Bloom] to let me fumble through trying to make this work, donations that came in, and a team of patient and flexible volunteers (who were also jumping into unknown waters), beginning in March of 2020, and repeated again in August of 2020, RAA is involved in the day-in, day-out schooling needs of every single child in our program.
Depending on their parent’s own education, language and technology skills, this can mean each family has anywhere from 1–6 tutors at any given time. The volunteer tutors do everything from teaching Algebra to learning tech programs to emailing teachers to helping kids prep for tests and check their grades. As Spring turned into Fall, we had lessons learned and new strategies built to tackle a new school year’s virtual challenges.
And then the silver linings appear.
Prior to the pandemic, our educational assistance was only periphery. Virtual schooling required that we take on the day-to-day needs of children in an up-close-and-personal way. This means that we see more clearly each child’s strengths and weaknesses. While working closely with one 5th grader, we discovered that the child could not read beyond a very basic level. His parents didn’t notice because they are mostly illiterate themselves. We now have a reading specialist working with him, as well as with other kids we discovered who are in the same boat. We would not have known the depth of their needs before the pandemic.
Additionally, we have all improved dramatically in regards to digital literacy. Many of the adults in our organization resisted technology (it’s incredibly difficult to learn new tech when you have educational and linguistic barriers), but with the pandemic, virtual help was all we could offer. New technology skills have opened up doors for our adult clients, as well as our kids. We live far from one another, covering two long, narrow counties, so virtual programming led us to be able to offer a meaningful mini-series for women, informative webinars on relevant topics (like Citizenship and Finances), and launch online ESL classes to enhance our English program.
We’ve also been able to enlist tutors from all over the U.S., and even abroad, since they now work virtually. This means we now have not only a larger number of tutors and mentors, but also a larger pool of skills represented. We can now respond more broadly to client’s needs. Our diversity, both in clients and volunteers, is one of the most beautiful things about us.
The pandemic hasn’t been easy for anyone, and our organizational response wasn’t planned out perfectly, but all of RAA’s children passed their grades last year (we had a few close calls!), and they are all attending and completing work this year. We look forward to the day when life returns to normal, and all the kids are back in school with their friends, teachers, and ESOL assistance. Until then, we will press on, knowing that our mission is more essential now than ever before.
Jamie Everett is Director of Operations at Refugee Assistance Alliance.
Refugee Assistance Alliance is one of eight founding members of the Hello Neighbor Network representing nonprofit refugee- and immigrant-serving community organizations from across the U.S.
