Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  “Advocacy and having a voice is important,” adds Sarah. “We have to teach them that in this country you vote for everything. Even when you’re in the classroom, you vote.”

  “I think it should be two separate ideas because being a citizen is not just about voting,” responds another teacher at the table. “It’s about having responsibility to your country, community, and family.”

  They continue back and forth. These are big ideas that sit at the heart of Sullivan’s mission, and ones that feel particularly urgent in an era of increasing nativism. But they are not easily defined. Ambareen does not interrupt. The issues, she finds, should be hashed out by teachers. To push them with students, they have to feel they are the guides in the framing of the ideas.

  Dirk Casto speaks up. “Can I just say something? We used to have more of a global view and now it’s a very narrow view. It’s like American citizenship. In the past, we’ve emphasized world citizens. These kids are not trapped here, and they need to learn how to be successful on a global scale.”

  Everyone around the table nods in assent. Ambareen suggests they add the thought to the mission statement.

  “Again,” she says, “Today we are developing the core ideas that will make Sullivan’s ELL program different from the rest. These ideas should be your North Star.”

  Ambareen breaks up the room into groups. She tells them to work in the shared Google drive. In one group, the conversation quickly derails into an argument on whether classes should be taught as bilingual curriculums. And then into whether teachers should be native speakers of the students’ languages. To do that, the school would need a staff of translators bigger than the U.N.’s to offer native proficiency to all the students. In another group, Dirk and Josh talk about the reality that students are often expected to work and take care of their families. Most stick to their own culture and language both inside and out of school.

  “Have you heard about the hidden curriculum?” Dirk asks Josh. “It’s what kids pick up outside of class. There’s a strong hidden curriculum in Sullivan, it’s what American culture they’re picking up from other kids in the building. That’s also something Sullivan offers.” Because Sullivan has not only a critical mass of refugee and other immigrant children, but also an American-born student body, teenagers new to America can draw on the collective intelligence of both groups to help digest and acclimate to their new world.

  Josh and Dirk continue to brainstorm ideas. Dirk squints at his laptop screen. “Who says that students should have a seamless transition into American culture?” he asks looking over another teacher’s answer on the shared document. “Nothing about this process is seamless. If anything, it’s a road full of speed bumps. America is a corporatocracy full of gringos. God, that sounds so dark, doesn’t it?”

  “Really, this whole exercise is about navigating what it means to be an immigrant in America,” adds Josh.

  “It’s true, though,” says Dirk. “At the end of the day, they’ll be treated like people who have an accent.” Josh starts to write the thought, but he erases it. That’s a conversation for another day.

  Chad Adams

  Chad excels in a crisis. This week tested how many he could juggle at the same time. Just past midnight on Monday, February 20, Antoine Livingston texted Chad an image grabbed from Snapchat, a low-angle selfie of a Sullivan senior shirtless, smiling, and holding a gun in his left hand. The boy stared down at the camera, his smile lines visible on either side of a muted grin. Overlaid on the image, the boy had typed the words: I’m shooting up Sullivan tomorrow :)

  Chad knew the kid; he was a goof. He could have just been mugging for the camera. Snapchat is like Hollywood for high schoolers and they playact on it. But he also knew that he couldn’t take the threat lightly. The week before, on February 14, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a student opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon, killing seventeen people. School shootings have been on the rise across the country since a gunman killed twenty first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Over the past five years, there have been at least 239 school shootings nationwide. Across them, 438 people have been shot, and 138 of them killed. In the days following the shooting at Parkland, the Chicago Police Department had been fielding dozens of shooting threats. Last Chad heard, the police department had flagged twenty-five threats that identified Chicago public high schools as targets.

  The following morning, Chad drafted an email to send to all Sullivan parents. His skill at such notes had been drilled into him during his career in the system. In 2012, at his last school on Chicago’s South Side, Harper High School, twenty-nine current or recent students were shot. Chad had developed a gift for finding the right words for notes to worried parents, but writing them never gets easy. He put the new communication on Sullivan digital letterhead, white paper with blue trim and the school insignia, an S with a tiger sitting on it. The school’s motto, “Learning is alive through everything we do and everywhere we go,” appears in the top righthand corner.

  Dear Parents and Guardians,

  We want to make you aware of a situation involving our school in recent days.

  Late last night, a student shared a social media posting that resembled a potential threat against the school. The Chicago Police Department and CPS Office of Safety and Security [were] immediately notified to investigate this threat. Upon completion of their assessment, the Chicago Police Department deemed the threat was not credible and there was no risk to student or staff.

  Your child’s safety will always be our highest priority. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the school.

  When the boy arrived at Sullivan on Tuesday morning, the police were waiting for him on the corner. He never did make it into the building. They arrested him on the spot. By the afternoon, Chad learned from the police that the gun in the photo was a fake that belonged to the boy’s grandfather. A prank gone too far. In fact, he’d spent the morning dropping his brother off at a nearby elementary school. Chad transferred the boy to an alternative school and he asked the police not to charge him.

  Before Chad arrived at Sullivan, the school operated strictly through punitive forms of punishment. Some years, the number of in-school suspensions totaled more than five hundred. One of Chad’s first moves as principal was eliminating the camera-monitored suspension room and replacing it with a peace room. The room, which sits on the second floor and boasts a clear view of the city skyline, is where Chad and his staff now run peace circles, a restorative practice that encourages students to come together to repair harm through conversation.

  Peace circles, however, did not replace Sullivan’s full-time security staff or the two Chicago police officers in the building. Keeping students safe inside the Sullivan building is an ever-changing challenge, and one Chad believes requires a multipronged approach. The Chicago police, for one, still have not identified who shot Esengo. School shootings are on the rise, and there doesn’t seem to be any effective way to predict them. Warm weather, too, will inevitably bring news of an uptick in violent crime across Chicago. Worse, yet, Chad worries the national temper may be shifting violently toward his immigrant, refugee, and especially Muslim students.

  Threats fill Chad’s thoughts when he arrives at his second-floor office. It is the classic two-room principal setup. Chad never uses the front room and its formidable rectangular metal desk, the kind every sinister principal sits behind in high school rom-com films. He prefers the more casual back room where he can talk to students and hold meetings at a round table.

  Ever since he sent out a note to parents about the Monday night threat, he has received a steady stream of text messages and emails from concerned and fearful parents and staff. They want to know their children are safe. Chad keeps checking his phone, shooting off short reassuring answers. Leaning over the mini fridge in the corner, he pulls out a bag of deli turkey, avocado, and a sandwich baggie full of ranch dressing. He’s trying the K
eto Diet, the no sugar, no carb cleanse, which he’s hoping will help him shed the weight he’s gained since he took the job at Sullivan. When he decided to apply for the role, several people told him not to take it if he got an offer. Colleagues said the school was likely to close and Chad’s career as a principal would end before it even got off the ground. But the fact that Sullivan was one of the worst-performing schools in the city didn’t deter Chad, it motivated him. He considered himself a person who ran toward fire rather than away from it.

  When Chad looks at his Sullivan ID, the image makes him laugh. He looks so young and sparkly eyed. The last five years have taken a toll.

  _______

  Growing up in Mississippi, Chad changed schools almost every year. His father, an undercover narcotics officer, couldn’t afford to stay in any one place long. His safety was always at risk. Chad remembered he had a collection of silk shirts worthy of Don Johnson’s James Crockett on Miami Vice. The trunk of his father’s unmarked car would sometimes be filled with machine guns. When he was working, Chad’s father would disappear for days on end and when he’d return, he would bring Chad oversized necklaces with heavy, embossed images of cannabis leaves. Inevitably, after six months in any one town, Chad’s father would announce that they were moving on. Chad credits his mother, who had Chad at nineteen, for raising him amid the chaos.

  When Chad was twelve, his family arrived in Gulfport, Mississippi. There, Chad was selected to attend one of the state’s first busing programs, an effort to desegregate schools across the state. Early each morning, Chad was bused to an almost entirely Black school on the north side of the city in time to be inside the school gates by 8 a.m. At 8:01 a.m., the gates were locked until the end of the school day. No one got in or out of the building until 3 p.m. Life inside the building, however, was worse for Chad than out. He was often cornered and beaten up. Trips to the bathroom usually guaranteed a pummeling. He had watches pulled from his wrist. Chad was also diagnosed with a learning disability midway through the year. He flunked the grade. That summer, Chad’s family left Mississippi for good and moved to Indiana for a new start.

  When Chad took the job as assistant principal at Harper High School in 2010, he knew the position would come with extreme academic and social challenges that would push him. His first day on the job, Chad watched as two boys tangled. Without thinking, Chad grabbed one of the boys and pulled him into a nearby classroom. Just as he managed to get inside the door, Chad saw a fist fly past him. Glass shattered everywhere and one boy landed a punch right in the other’s face. The boy in the hallway had punched through the door’s window. Holy fuck, Chad thought to himself, what have I gotten myself into?

  But Chad soon learned that physical fights were symptoms of much deeper struggles. At Harper, students carried heavy burdens. Englewood was a place penetrated by pain. Trauma touched countless households in the South Side neighborhood, and living there meant enduring the corrosive effects of poverty and gun violence. Much of Chad’s job at Harper was finding ways to help kids cope. But Chad also came to understand the limits of his position, a lesson that came with heartbreak.

  One Harper student Chad still thinks about is Cedric. He tried to greet Cedric every day during lunch. Chad, the once-bullied kid, always found himself drawn to the outsiders. Cedric was a sweet, quiet freshman with a big smile and wireframe glasses. Chad recalls the last time he saw Cedric alive. He waved to the boy as he sat in the cafeteria finishing his lunch. A week later, a policeman called to say a student had been shot and killed a block from school. That was a few days before spring break, and Chad was the only administrator on campus. He agreed to try to identify the body. It was Cedric on the concrete, in a pool of blood where he had been gunned down. Cedric’s mother was leaning over him screaming. A police helicopter flew overhead looking for the shooters. Chad remembers the noise of the helicopter mixing with Cedric’s mother’s cries.

  The police failed to identify or catch Cedric’s killer. And over the next three years, more than fifty current and former Harper students were shot, nine of them killed. One morning, Chad witnessed a teen in a Batman suit riding a moped and spraying half a dozen people down with an Uzi. On another, he got out of his car to the sounds of two boys shooting into a crowd of students on the school blacktop. So much of Chad’s job involved managing the trauma and fallout of students’ experiences that he failed to notice his own.

  By the time Chad started his job at Sullivan, he had developed post-traumatic stress disorder. He would see stains of red whenever he heard helicopters overhead. And there were those images of Cedric lying on the ground. They paralyzed him for minutes at a time. When he’d sit in his office, Chad would involuntarily jerk his neck backward. Later, he realized it was a habit he’d developed from hearing gunshots on a regular basis. Chad, it turns out, had not just come to Sullivan to turn the school around. Sullivan was also his chance to heal.

  _______

  At Sullivan, Chad keeps a journal in an office desk drawer. Faded and buried under a pile of books, the pages pay homage to his students who have died from gun violence. The heightened threats at Sullivan have reminded him that he has a few names to add. None of them Sullivan students, thank goodness. Chad intends to keep it that way. But he knows better than most, that no matter how many drills or rules or peace circles he runs, the world doesn’t stop at the doors of a school. Rather, the entire world seems to unfold inside of them. At Sullivan, refugee students share space with Chicago kids who fight to survive, too. Among them is a football star who started selling drugs at age eight when his mother could no longer afford to pay rent. Another, a buoyant senior alive with school spirit who has spent his life bouncing between dozens of foster homes. There are students who have seen friends gunned down and those who memorize Bible verses hoping they won’t face a similar fate. So many Sullivan students bear witness to the tragic and the horrifically ugly. But, then again. February can be depressing.

  8

  MARCH

  Alejandro

  Alejandro hasn’t heard from his mother, Luana, in five days. He’s beginning to worry. Or, rather, he’s beginning to worry more than usual. The two last spoke on Sunday before Alejandro left the house for a soccer game. Alejandro doesn’t expect to speak to his mother every day. He often goes several days without hearing from her. Luana still lives in Guatemala City and can only communicate with her son when she has money to buy a bit of data on her mobile phone. Alejandro’s father usually sends Luana money on the weekends, and some of that allows the two to text and video chat each other. The small amount of data tends to last a few days, depending on how many other phone calls Luana makes. Five days without any contact, however, is unusual.

  Alejandro knows there are numerous reasons his mother might not be reachable. She may have lost her phone. Her neighborhood, Alejandro’s old neighborhood, may be gripped by one of its occasional blackouts. She could have spent her data allowance calling other family members. Alejandro holds on to such reasons. If he lets his mind wander unchecked, his worries grow macabre.

  Alejandro sits on the pullout futon couch in the living room, which doubles as a second bedroom. He has the main bedroom to himself while his father, Sergio, and his stepmother sleep on the unfolded couch at night. His gray shirt blends with the plaid comforter that covers the futon. As usual, a FIFA soccer game fills the large television that sits across from the couch. The match is not one that Alejandro is invested in. He mutes it. The small table between the bed and screen hold an array of condiments: ketchup, Cholula and tomatillo hot sauces, and a bottle of partially finished orange soda. The small desk where Alejandro does homework sits against the wall. Over it, on a calendar mounted on a small whiteboard, the senior has marked his graduation date with a bright blue circle. Two framed paper certificates celebrate Alejandro’s top grades, earned at the end of his junior year. He wouldn’t get one this term. He has let his grades slip. Alejandro unlocks his phone screen for the umpteenth time and looks for a sign of his
mother. He sees the last conversation he had with Luana. It began the same way as hundreds of conversations the two have had over the last five years.

  Good morning, son. How are you? Luana wrote.

  Good morning, Alejandro responded.

  I pray to God that you have a good day today, Luana continued. I pray that no one hurts you. And I pray that you are successful in all you do. Your brother is sick. He hasn’t been feeling well. My bones have been hurting, Son.

  Alejandro knows the complaint his mother describes. When the temperature drops, his bones ache as though a bitter wind chill has settled in his marrow.

  I haven’t been feeling so good, either, Alejandro wrote. I took some medicine at 2 a.m. I’m going to take more now.

  Son, you must eat something before you take medicine.

  For the last five years, Luana has parented over text message. She texts to make sure he does his homework. She keeps tabs on his grades. Luana asks about Alejandro’s girlfriend and if he scored at his most recent soccer match. She encourages him to go to bed at a reasonable hour and to limit the time he spends playing his FIFA video games.

  What are you doing now? Luana continued.

  I’m eating.

  Luana also regularly asks Alejandro about graduation. He will be her first child to graduate from high school. Though she’s twenty-eight hundred miles away, Luana wants to ensure that nothing prevents her son from walking across the stage. She knows that with just three months until graduation, Alejandro cannot afford any major missteps, not at school and not outside. Luana is not alone. Alejandro’s father, his friends, the Sullivan teachers, and Alejandro himself all know that things that might be blips in another teenager’s life could completely derail his future in the United States. Hopes are on him. Despite the distance between them, Alejandro knows that his mother already sees his graduation fully in her imagination. Why worry her with his dropping grades? News of his poor grades would hit her hard, even if it won’t keep him from earning his diploma. Alejandro prefers not to burden his mother with bad news. The stakes are too high. He’d rather focus their conversations around helping Luana get to Chicago. If for no other reason, Alejandro intends to graduate high school and land a well-paying job so he can save up and buy Luana a house.