The Long Journey from the Wat: Part 1

By Kristin Bair, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer

From August 2004 through April 2005, 15,000 Hmong refugees from Wat Tham Krabok, a camp in Thailand, will be resettling in the United States. Of the 5,000 people who will settle in St. Paul, Minnesota, well over 1,000 are school-age children. Since finding out about the incoming students in February 2004, the St. Paul Public Schools have been working to prepare programs and curriculum to accommodate them.

Two additional articles about the children from Wat Tham Krabok and their experiences in the St. Paul schools will follow in upcoming issues of the ELL Outlook™.

The Journey: From Thailand to St. Paul

Over thirty years ago during the Vietnam War, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency secretly enlisted Laotian Hmong farmers in special guerrilla units designed to hold off Communist troops. Throughout the war, the covert army helped to rescue downed American pilots and interrupted supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Commanded by a Hmong, General Vang Pao, the units achieved many triumphs, but Hmong casualties were high. When the war ended in 1975, the Pathet Lao communists took control of Laos, and the United States pulled out. Thousands of Hmong were killed or sent to reeducation camps. Some, including General Vang Pao, were brought to the United States; others escaped into the mountains and have been hiding there ever since; and many others escaped to Thailand and settled in refugee camps. For those who escaped, returning to Laos was too dangerous.

Since then, these secret soldiers, their families, and their descendants have led transient lives. In the mid 1990s, those who settled in refugee camps in Thailand were given a choice by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: they could resettle abroad or return to Laos voluntarily. Once again, they were pushed out. Thousands fled the camps, and approximately 15,000 to 20,000 settled at Wat Tham Krabok, a Buddhist temple about an hour outside of Bangkok. The abbot of the temple generously welcomed and protected them. A few years ago, he died, and upon his death, the Thai government decided to move the Wat refugees to yet another remote location.

Three girls in a classroom in Thailand.

Finally, in 2004, the United States accepted responsibility for the Laotian refugees, and plans were made to resettle 15,000 people from Wat Tham Krabok to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California. With just a few months of preparation time, school systems in these states had to establish newcomer programs, hire staff, write curriculum, and ready the community to accommodate the hundreds of new students they would enroll.

First Contact: St. Paul Meets the Wat

In February 2004, St. Paul, Minnesota, Mayor Randy Kelly traveled to Wat Tham Krabok in central Thailand with a delegation of representatives from the St. Paul community and St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS). The members of SPPS who were part of the delegation use shorthand when they talk about the camp. They call it the Wat, and they learned first-hand that no one in our country could ever comprehend the conditions in which these people lived.

"It was an eye-opening experience for me," said Valeria Silva, ELL Director for SPPS. "It was the opportunity of a lifetime to see what happens to people all across a war, the realities of the world that we don't always see. I grew up in Chile, and I've seen poverty. But the levels of poverty I saw in this camp were different. It was not just economic poverty, but an inability to be free. People weren't able to make choices about who they wanted to be and what they wanted to do."

According to Silva, the people who lived at the Wat were astoundingly resilient. "It was 97 or 98 degrees. Very humid," she said. "And there was no water. The mountains are granite, and the Thai government exports the granite from there. About every thirty minutes, you hear a sound like a bomb going off. And this dust comes down from the mountains and settles all the way up to the knees. But yet the people woke up every day and did the best they could. Everywhere I went, I saw smiling faces and kids playing with nothing."

But, Silva explained, despite the poverty, the living conditions, the nutritional struggles, the lack of education, and the daily challenges of obtaining food and water, parents with whom the St. Paul delegation spoke asked the same questions we all ask: Will we have access to health care? Will my child get an education?

Mo Chang, Charter Schools Liaison and Special Projects Coordinator of SPPS, also traveled to Thailand with the delegation. Chang came to the United States as a child in 1976 as a Hmong refugee from another camp in Thailand. Her return to Thailand as a representative of St. Paul and the schools brought her full circle. "It was a great experience for me," she said. "To be in a position to travel with Mayor Kelly, do the assessment, and come back and put the program together for these kids who are just like I was, I mean, how good can you get?"

St. Paul Schools: The Preparation

With over 100 schools, 149 ESL programs, and an average enrollment of 200-300 new ELL students each year, the St. Paul public schools had a strong base for setting up a program for the Hmong refugees from Wat Tham Krabok.

"Currently, we have eight Language Academy Schools," explained Silva. "And, normally, the students who come with zero English are placed in these schools in classrooms with students who are English speakers. Then we provide additional staffing, trained ELL teachers, and bilingual support and materials, so those kids begin their education experience with English-speaking students."

When the St. Paul team learned that a great number of the Hmong refugee students would be enrolling in their schools, they were inclined to follow the same model. The problem was that there were just too many variables. All they knew in the beginning was that they would receive at least 500 new students during the 2004-2005 school year.

"We knew we were going to have kids," said Silva, "lots of them, but we didn't know at what grade levels, we didn't know what educational experience or health conditions they would have, and we didn't know how many."

So instead, Silva and her team at SPPS created Transitional Language Centers (TLC), classrooms within St. Paul schools that would accommodate only students from Wat Tham Krabok. Students will remain in the TLCs for at least one year and then transition into Language Academy classrooms.

At first, this decision caused unrest in St. Paul's extensive Hmong community. "Some members of the community spoke out against the TLCs because they separate kids. There was a lot of indecision. But now that the community has witnessed the success of the program, it has embraced the TLCs," explained Silva.

Como Park Elementary School chose to become a TLC. Nancy Stachel, the principal of Como Park, said, "Our initial reaction was wow, we have to give up five classrooms. It was June [2004], the end of the year, and everything was planned for the next year already. So at first there was a little bit of 'Oh my God.'"

"But," added Stachel, "I love the response my area superintendent had when I told her I'd decided to have our school become a TLC. She said that when she thinks of Como, she thinks of the Statue of Liberty. We have a 'Come on in and we'll make it work' mentality."

The decision to create TLCs and to open their schools and hearts to the refugee children from the Wat was easy for the St. Paul team, but the work required to make it happen was extensive. It required the dedication of a number of people, including Mark Thompson, a Como Park teacher who has been working with newcomers for eleven years. He currently is teaching a fourth-to-sixth-grade class at the TLC.

Throughout the summer, he and a team of teachers created a curriculum for the Hmong newcomers. "We created one curriculum for everyone," Thompson explained, "figuring all of us were smart enough and experienced enough to adapt it for our particular grades." While SPPS has already written and published the most extensive English-Hmong dictionary in the world, Thompson and his team also created a picture version so that incoming Wat students would have a working resource.

The Students

Although the TLCs in St. Paul were prepared for all the children on the first day of school, the new Hmong students arrived slowly at first. For the first week or two, there were only fifty who made the journey to the United States.

"But in the middle of September," Silva explained, "it started. I'm talking about 25-50 kids a day until the end of October. It was constant. Some days, schools received 10 kids in the morning and another 15 in the afternoon." Enrollment has continued to increase steadily since, with a few ebbs and flows, and over 1,000 new students from the Wat have enrolled in SPPS since September.

"Here at Como, we have five TLC classrooms," explained Stachel, "with a total of 136 students. Each classroom is staffed with two teachers: one is ELL licensed and the other is elementary ed licensed. In every class, one of those two teachers is a native Hmong speaker. In addition, we've got two full-time native-Hmong-speaking educational assistants. They rotate from classroom to classroom and accompany the students to specialist classes [science, gym, music] for translation and interpretation."

Because the skill levels and educational levels of the students were so diverse, Como set up its TLC with multigrade classrooms. It was the logical solution because although some of the children did attend school in Thailand, some had never seen a pencil sharpener or held a pencil.

"Every child is a little bit different," explained Stachel. "We have different maturity levels depending on what each child's role was within the family. If they were the oldest, they worked and had a huge responsibility put on them. If they were the baby, they didn't."

Everyone involved in the program expressed how excited the children were to be in the schools. Though the teachers expected a difficult transition, it was much less dramatic than they anticipated.

"At first, we had super-eager kids who were so scared they were in tears," Thompson said. "We had to do a good bit of comforting in the first days, but the other kids who had arrived before them welcomed them so graciously. They became friends and best friends."

One of the toughest challenges was the continual arrival of new students. "At first, we had to teach rituals and classroom routines every day," Thompson said, "but then kids started teaching each other."

This is a major theme in Thompson's class. "When we started out on day one, we had only six students, and most of the teaching had to be done in Hmong. Most kids didn't know a word of English. But now we have enough kids who understand some of what I say, and they're able to tell the others, so those who know tell those who don't know," he said.

Teacher Mark Thompson works with students from Wat Tham Krabok in his TLC classroom at Como Park Elementary School.

According to Thompson, another major challenge was creating a curriculum that would challenge the new Hmong students and teach them the basics but not leave them far behind the students in the mainstream classes. So while they are teaching the basics-colors, clothes, numbers, etc.-Thompson also introduces some subjects from the mainstream curriculum.

"Right now we're doing lots of Martin Luther King things. I made CDs for all the kids of King's most famous speech," said Thompson, "and challenged the kids to memorize it. One of my kids called me last night to tell me he's got it all done. That's after three days, and he probably doesn't know half the words. It's amazing."

Other features of the mainstream curriculum that Thompson and the other TLC teachers at Como Park feature are the Writer's Workshop and the Reader's Workshop.

"Right now, in Writer's Workshop," Thompson explained, "we're working on a how-to, and we're doing 'How to Cook Rice.' The mainstream classes are doing how-to's, as well, but of course in those classes, the kids choose their own individual topics. It works for us because 'How to Cook Rice' builds on our students' background knowledge, and next year, when they're in a mainstream classroom, they'll be familiar with the how-to form."

Thompson's class recently did a unit on occupations, which is part of the fourth-grade curriculum in Minnesota. "It was a stretch," said Thompson, "but it worked well. We've had a Hmong artist/legislator, a Hmong farmer/social worker, a Hmong principal, an American police officer with a dog, and a few others. It was a great opportunity for modeling to the kids, and they loved it. They asked tons of questions, most of them about education: How long did you have to go to school to have this job? What did you have to study?"

After the presentations, the students chose an occupation they would like to pursue and wrote a report on it. After the students read them into the computer, Thompson made a CD so they could hear each other read.

As Thompson points out, the kids are not without struggles. Though their lives are in some ways much richer, they are still poor. Many have just one or two sets of clothes that they wear three or four days in a row and only one pair of shoes. While teachers have not witnessed any blatant racism in the school, the native English-speaking students have not been welcoming and warm. This is a learning experience for everyone.

But no matter what, the journey of the Wat Tham Krabok children will continue. St. Paul has offered them an amazing opportunity that comes not from obligation but from a firm commitment to the education of all students and to a strong belief in global communities.

Gaohmong Vang, daughter of Como Park TLC teacher Xay Thow, performs at the Hmong New Year celebration at Como Park Elementary School on November 10, 2004. (Photo by Al Levin)

"Every day I learn something about a different culture," Silva said. "To me, that's how every educator should look at their kids. At St. Paul, there's a massive group of students who come from all over the world, and it's not what I can give them, but what I can learn from them to be a better professional."

If you have any comments about this article or questions for for the author, please send them to: alex@coursecrafters.com.