San Antonio Express-News

By Jenny LaCoste-Caputo

Nour Kassem can breathe a little easier this school year.

And so can Joselyne Bambarukontari, Saadia Abdi and thousands of other children across Texas who came here as political refugees, seeking asylum from the war and starvation many of them faced in their home countries.

Until this school year, these children who come speaking no English and often have never been to school or even held a pencil were required under state law to take the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills as soon as two years after arrival.

But this spring, legislators included a provision in the bill that overhauled the state's school accountability system that will allow those children to be exempted from TAKS for up to five years.

“I think it is a great example of how we need to be better listeners to our teachers and our school administrators,” said Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, who, along with Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, championed the exemption. “They're the ones that have a direct working relationship with the schoolchildren and we need to give them room to exercise their professional judgment and discretion.”

Educators say refugees who had to take TAKS before they were ready were set up for failure.

“The kids had no concept of the language yet. For a lot of them it was very demoralizing,” said Rebecca Flores, principal of Mead Elementary in Northside Independent School District. “I think it can be very damaging.”

Thousands of people escaping genocide and persecution are resettled each year by a State Department program. In 2007, the program brought 48,000 refugees to the United States, with 4,394 making Texas their home. Catholic Charities, the agency that oversees the program in San Antonio, resettled 600 last year and expects more this year.

Catholic Charities receives federal funding to house the refugees for six months and is required to place them in low-crime areas and close together so they can form a community. The children end up grouped in certain schools, almost all of them in the Northside district.

At Mead and nearby Colonies North Elementary, where most of the refugee children end up, principals have created “newcomer” classes where teachers can work on language, behavior and social skills, as well as academics. But the children have to move out of those classes soon, so they can prepare for the TAKS.

A testing exemption will allow teachers to keep students in the newcomer classes if they're not ready to transition into grade-level classrooms. Still, principals at both schools said many of the children have made enough progress that they will put them in grade-level classes with teachers certified in teaching English as a second language.

“We're trying to mix them in as much as possible,” said Sonya Kirkham, principal at Colonies North. Both Kirkham and Flores said it's important to make sure the children are mixing with their American peers and exposed to grade-level curriculum.

But even for those who move on to traditional classes, the testing exemption comes into play. Just because they've been placed in regular classrooms doesn't mean they're prepared to pass TAKS.

“It gives us more time to get them ready for the test,” Kirkham said. “They've grown so much. We're going to get them there. It's just going to take some time.”

This summer, Northside was awarded a $50,000 grant from the First Lady's Family Literacy Initiative for Texas to help refugee children catch up with their peers.

The grant will support Project Tumaini, a Swahili word that means to hope and believe with confidence. The project will provide intensive instruction for refugee families — children and parents — focused on becoming English literate. It will include educational support services, educating school personnel on the unique needs of refugees, and programs that will help restore the parent-child bond that was lost or weakened due to the refugee experience.

Mead teacher Kerry Haupert knows firsthand how much extra help the refugee children need. She teaches one of the newcomer classes and teaches refugee kids in summer school. Testing her students this spring, even on the Linguistically Accommodated Test, or LAT, which is given to non-English speakers, was a traumatic experience. The test is given in English and most of Haupert's students have been in the country less than a year.

“Some of them just broke down,” she said. “One of my students just looked at the test, shook his head and started to cry.”