August 17, 2008 - August 23, 2008 Archives

The shuttle bus driver who picked me up from the airport and drove me to the rental car lot was a chatty fellow. As I was the only other person on the bus, it wasn’t like I couldn’t respond. Besides he was nice. Minnesota Nice. You know, that famed, often parodied (think Fargo) Midwestern version of Southern hospitality.

In my short two-and-a-half day visit to St. Paul for September’s ASBJ, I was treated to numerous displays of this distinctive graciousness and generosity, whether it was the district spokesman who cleared his entire schedule to chaperone me around town or the person on the street who wrote down detailed instructions after I got hopelessly lost.

No doubt, it’s this kindness that made Minnesota a mecca for immigrants, not just once (in 1910, nearly a third of the state’s population was foreign born, twice the national average) but twice (in the 1990s alone, Minnesota’s immigrant population more than doubled.)

It was the very reason I was coming to St. Paul, home to a large Somali and Hmong population. I wanted to see this diversity and the changes it has brought in action. I didn’t know it would start as soon I landed.

The drive from the airport to the rental lot was short, maybe five minutes, but in that time, the bus driver and I had a lengthy conversation; where was I from, what did I do, what brought me to St. Paul? Hey, who’s the reporter here?

Yes, the driver said, nodding his head, there are a lot of Somalis in the area. This place here, he said, pointing to a gas station we passed. It’s all Somalis now. They hang out there all day, drinking coffee. They like coffee. But they don’t like black people; those two don’t get along, he confided in me.

As I listened quietly to the driver’s observations, I thought, this was going to be an interesting trip. Minnesota Nice, in its most stereotypical form, includes an aversion to bringing up anything unpleasant. It’s a polite veneer, an eagerness to always, well, make nice. Yet here this perfect stranger busting that stereotype. What else had changed in Minnesota? Yes, this was going to be an interesting trip.

My story on immigration and its impact on the St. Paul schools will be available at www.asbj.com on Wednesday (Aug. 20), part of a package on immigration and diversity. Stay tuned.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor

Read this and tell me: How does it make you feel?

“America, love it or leave it.”

If you’re under 50, you may have no reaction at all. But if you grew up in the ‘60s, as I did, my guess is that you can’t say those words without feeling some sort of visceral punch -- a flashback to the era of civil rights and Vietnam, drugs and war protests, and that emerging phenomenon called the counterculture.

I thought about that line and its deceptive simplicity (of course, if you didn’t like a place -- be it a city, state, or country -- you would probably leave if you could) when seeing a bumper sticker on a pickup truck in Prince William County, Va., last spring. The driver had come to a public hearing on a controversial new law aimed at ridding Prince William -- its homes, its businesses, and its schools -- of undocumented immigrants.

It said: “What part of ‘illegal’ do you not understand?”

Like the quote from the ‘60s, this one carries the same air of certainty and simplicity -- to which I wanted to reply “Yes, but….”

Yes, many of the foreign workers and their families are illegal, but do you want to deport them all? How will you do that? What impact will that have on their communities? Their families? Their children?

My story on the Prince William controversy and its effect on the public schools is in the September issue of ASBJ, part of a special report titled “Immigration and Diversity,” which will be online Wednesday at www.asbj.com. Other editors have written on dramatic demographic changes facing schools in other parts of the country, in states like Maine, Arizona, Georgia, and Minnesota.

The promises of this new diversity are as considerable as its challenges. As citizens, we’ll disagree on what steps to take to both secure our borders and adjust to life as a nation of minorities, which, come 2042, the United States will be.

But one thing is certain: These solutions -- whatever they prove to be -- won’t fit on a bumper sticker.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

The dropout rate for immigrant and foreign-born students is a huge problem for many schools. One thing we know for certain: The later a foreign-born student begins school in the United States, the higher the chance they will drop out before earning a high school diploma.

Using 2000 US Census data, the Pew Hispanic Trust reported that the average yearly dropout rate of foreign-born students ages 15 to 17 was 11.7 percent. But of those students who had arrived more than eight years earlier, only 5 percent dropped out each year. The dropout rate for those who arrived less than eight years prior was 16.4 percent. The percentage of native-born dropouts was 3.3 percent.

Perhaps even more telling is a student’s prior educational attainment. If a student had received a continuous education and made normal education progress in their home country before migrating to the U.S., the dropout rate was 9.9 percent. However, if the student’s education was interrupted or incomplete, his or her chances of dropping out soared to 70.9 percent.

“It doesn’t really matter if we look at youth from Central or South America, or Asia, regardless of what country they come from the later-arrived youth are much more likely to not be in school,” says Richard Fry, a senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Trust.

Fry also believes that many teenagers who come to the U.S. to work may never enter the school system, thus inflating those figures.

Norcross High School in suburban Atlanta is one of many schools that’s struggling to keep its immigrant populations engaged and in school. The teachers and administrators learned a lot from their experiences, and you can read about those in our series on diversity in ASBJ’s September issue.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

It was just another day at Sopori Elementary School—until a U.S. Border Patrol agent walked into the principal’s office in full riot gear. Agents were about to conduct a raid at a nearby house, he announced, and it might be best to “lock down” the school as a precaution.

When your school is only a half-hour’s drive from the Arizona-Mexican border, issues of campus security take on an extra nuance.

Security wasn’t an issue on my mind when I visited Sahuarita, Ariz., last spring to conduct research for the September ASBJ’s special report on immigration and diversity. I naively assumed my talk with school officials would focus solely on educating illegal immigrants.

How wrong I was.

The lock-down at Sopori occurred the day I arrived. And district officials mentioned that there’d been another incident the previous year at another school campus.

“Illegal aliens were being tracked from the air by the Border Patrol,” said Superintendent Jay St. John." There were eight of them in a small vehicle, and they abandoned it right outside our campus. They took off across the playground, and one helicopter came down low enough for agents to jump out ad give chase. It was a little scary.”

Just days after my visit, I got an e-mail from the district concerning yet another incident. During a routine traffic stop by the Border Patrol, two men fled in a vehicle that was later found near a school. One of the suspects was found lying in the road just off campus. It appeared he’d fallen or been pushed from the vehicle.

They vehicle had been left in a dry wash, the Nogales International newspaper reported, along with eight bundles of marijuana.

Such incidents shouldn’t come as a surprise—at least, not once you recall that untold thousands of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers attempt to cross our border every year. Incidents occur near the border every day, and we have to accept that some will take place near a school. No one wants that to happen. But it does. And school officials have to be ready.

Yet there's a lesson to draw from all of this. We forget sometimes that diversity isn’t just about differences in the color of our skin or our cultural heritage. Our nation owes its diversity also to the varied life experiences of our citizens.

In a rural, desert community, just a few miles from the border, school officials face issues that simply aren't that common to their peers living amidst the cornfields of Iowa.

Del Stover, Senior Editor

Sue Martin is director of English Language Learner programs for the Lewiston City Schools, but she does much more than her title implies.

Yes, she’s expert in the different theories of English as a Second Language instruction and well-versed in the intricacies and difficulties of teaching students who aren’t literate in their own language.

She’s also a key connection between the schools and the Somali refugees who started moving to this working-class Maine town in 2001. The Somalis, a conservative Muslim group, don’t integrate much with the rest of the city’s mostly white, predominately Catholic residents. The schools are one place where the two groups intersect.

Misunderstandings are inevitable when these two very different cultures meet.

An example: Middle school students were assigned to write their autobiographies, which would be included in a book published by the school system. Many Somali middle-schoolers, who had a firmer grip on spoken English than on written English, told their stories to an interviewer.

Word got around that the girls were being interviewed about female circumcision, causing an uproar. The Somalis wondered why the school district was asking about such things. Martin didn’t know how the rumor started, but she contacted two Somali women with whom she frequently works to help quell the suspicion.

Martin was a longtime administrator in the school system before she took the job as ELL director. She knows the community intimately and she’s made it her business to become familiar with the town’s newest residents.

She understands that communication is just as important as curriculum when it comes to educating immigrant students.

Read more about Lewiston and the Somalis in my article “A Town Unified by Schools.” While you’re there, make sure to read the other articles in September’s special report on immigration and diversity.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor