The School I Deserve by Jo Napolitano

Author:Jo Napolitano [Napolitano, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sheila Mastropietro, director of the Lancaster office of Church World Service, was the first witness to give testimony in the case, introduced to the court by ACLU attorney Vic Walczak. Mastropietro used the time to outline refugees’ needs upon arrival as well as her organization’s efforts to meet them. She said the newcomers arrive with almost nothing and that it’s up to her agency to find and furnish their first apartment and supply them with clothes.

Resettlement workers then help families register their children for school, find jobs for the adults in the household, acquire Social Security cards for all, and orient the refugees to their new community, she said. The adults also must register for English language classes.

The goal, as established by the federal government, is for refugees to become self-sufficient within three to six months. But the timeframe is ambitious, particularly for the youngest newcomers, all of whom have experienced at least some trauma as a result of leaving their home country and culture, Mastropietro said.

“Depending on where they’re from, they’ve also been through a civil war or a breakdown in their country’s government where there’s chaos or they’ve lived in refugee camps where there’s not as much order as in a stable country,” she told the court. “The atmosphere for their parents is not good either.”

Mastropietro said most of the children she resettled in recent years did not speak English upon arrival to the States and many had been kept from the classroom for years in their home countries. “I can’t remember anyone who didn’t have a break in their education, whether it’s Iraqi or Syrian or the Somali or the Congolese,” she said. Most of these children did not have school transcripts, report cards, or other records, she told the court.

But no matter their educational attainment prior to arrival in America, the refugees had one thing in common. “Everybody seems to want to go to school,” Mastropietro said, from the youngest newcomer to the oldest entrant. “They expect to go to school, I would say.”

Even the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan, who wandered East Africa for years starting in the 1980s, pushed for enrollment upon arriving in America, she said. Some forty such children resettled in Lancaster.

“Their story was really tragic,” Mastropietro told the court. “The northern Sudanese army would come into southern Sudan and go through the villages and take young boys because they could turn them into soldiers.”

Desperate to escape this fate, more than twenty thousand boys, some as young as six, fled the region. Only half survived the thousand-mile trek out of Sudan, through the length of Ethiopia, and on to Kenya. Many of the boys died of disease, starvation, or dehydration; some were shot to death or eaten by lions. But even after all of this, after their parents, friends, and siblings had been slain, the surviving children held out hope for a better life.

Those who came to the States had high ambitions, Mastropietro said. “They all wanted to go to college,” she said.

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