Refugees in Roseville

Nenette Onstad scans the students streaming past her classroom at Maplewood's Edgerton Elementary at the end of each day, waving goodbye to each student in her English-language-learner program. ¶ Many of the students who meet Onstad's gaze arrived in her class four months ago with no last names, just a few words of English and nightmares from home still fresh in their minds. ¶ Now, they wave back and offer big smiles. ¶ "I enjoy having them," Onstad said. "But they need a lot of help."

The Karen, an ethnic minority in an armed conflict with the government in Myanmar, came in unexpected numbers to the Roseville School District in the fall, and district employees are working feverishly to meet the group's myriad needs for living here while keeping education at the forefront of its mission. There are now roughly 140 Karen students in the district, most of whom arrived from refugee camps in Thailand this past summer. Local Karen leaders expect another wave of refugees next summer. To handle the crunch, the district hired another English-language-learner (ELL) teacher and a Karen liaison. Onstad holds English classes for parents every Wednesday night.

District staff members worked with churches to find mentors for nearly two-thirds of the 37 Karen families in the district.

And donations turned the Fairview Community Center into a makeshift food shelf, clothing bank and Christmas gift shop.

"It was an amazing surprise for me. I've never seen [support] before like that," said Wilfred Tun Baw, who came to St. Paul seven years ago and is president of the Karen Community of Minnesota, which helps new arrivals get settled in the United States. "The Roseville area is perfect. It's helped a lot to my people."

The Karen immigrants also benefit the district, helping push the enrollment to more than 6,400 as of Oct. 1 -- or back to its 2000-01 level at a time when enrollment is falling in many first-ring suburbs.

But it is a struggle to get the children caught up in school. Most Karen children are learning rudimentary English and there's little chance students older than sixth grade will ever take traditional classes.

Then there's the scarcity of Karen translators and the requirement that new students meet federal No Child Left Behind standards after one year in the country.

Response was swift

Roughly 1,000 Karen live in Minnesota. They had been coming to St. Paul for several years, and local Karen leaders notified the St. Paul schools that there would be another round of refugees last fall.

But the new group settled north of Larpenteur Avenue, in the Roseville district.

Edgerton teachers made contact with many Karen through a summer reading group at nearby apartments.

No one anticipated, however, that there would be so many new students.

"We'd get these kids coming off a bus, and we had no idea who they were," district cultural services manager Peg Kennedy said.

The Karen children did not bring immunization records to school, and without an interpreter, the district had no way of communicating such needs to the families.

It quickly hired Mya Phyu, a Maplewood woman who came to the United States in 2003, as a Karen liaison.

She became indispensable to Roseville.

She immediately showed up with stacks of immunization records. Phyu helped establish a relationship between the district and St. Paul's First Baptist Church, which about 120 Karen attend each Sunday.

That led to an October meeting among Kennedy, First Baptist pastor Bill Englund and a group of churches, during which more than 20 families signed up to mentor Karen families.

First Baptist has become a Sunday hub for the Karen, and during the rest of the week, Phyu and the mentors stop by to help students with homework and help parents make sense of the American system.

"We teach them anything you can possibly imagine if you just arrived here -- how to sort their mail, that's the city bus, this is the police," said Thelma James, a retired Little Canada woman who, with her husband, John, is sponsoring a Karen family of eight. "They're so gracious, so quick with smiles."

Glaring needs still abound

But it's becoming evident the Karen's needs will be large for a long time.

James points to 5-year-old Look Ler Paw, whose family received a letter from the district in September saying she was registered for Head Start classes. But they couldn't read it.

James started working with them in November and didn't plow that far into their stack of mail until Dec. 21.

"Every time you visit, you find one more thing to look into," she said.

And while teachers praise the Karen students' hunger to learn, they're quickly finding how tough it is to scale the language barrier.

All Karen junior high and high school students take classes at the Fairview Community Center's alternative learning center, which has twice the number of expected students in its first year, in part because of the Karen students.

Elementary schoolers attend regular classes for part of the day, but the nuances of English make it hard to keep up.

More than 10 percent of Roseville's students are classified as having limited English proficiency, meaning ELL teachers like Onstad have more than just Karen students to help, said Chris Sonenblum, district director of student services.

The Karen students need so much attention, however, that Onstad finds herself spending much of the day teaching the new refugees simple consonant-vowel-consonant words.

And no one expects much success when the students take state standardized tests for the first time, especially when everything, including how to fill out the test form, is new.

"We're teaching them how to bubble-in answers and write their name," Onstad said. "They're not going to be up to snuff to take grade-level tests."

That, undoubtedly, will hurt the district's chance of making "adequate yearly progress" with No Child Left Behind in coming years.

The Karen's needs have become more real than a set of numbers directed toward satisfying a federal law.

"It just would warm your heart to hear these stories," the school district's Kennedy said. "These families are so open, so appreciative, so willing to learn. And they lived in such fear in their home country and Thailand. It really is an incredible group of people."

Ben Goessling • 651-298-1546