Friends of Refugees is an independent, nonpartisan citizens group monitoring the U.S. refugee resettlement program.
Posted by Christopher Coen on April 18, 2012
The Nickel City Smiler film will screen in Burlington on April 23.
Nickel City Smiler Movie – Karen People of Burma Refugee Documentary Film
Nickel City Smiler will be screening in North End Studios, Studio B in Burlington, Vermont on April 23rd at 7pm. Please come out and support Caroline Grace Casey and the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program.
Posted in Burlington, Burma/Myanmar | Tagged: Burma, Myanmar, Nickel City Smiler, refugees, resettlement, Smiler Greely | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on February 27, 2012
Vermont is now trying to make public safety of paramount concern irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation or any other characteristic. Up until now people have used law enforcement and other instruments of the state to play out personal prejudices against minorities, or anyone else seen as vulnerable or an easy victim. Even today in Vermont police are more likely to stop and ticket minority drivers and search their vehicles, according to a recent study. Now the state government is trying to make sure that there is a legitimate reason for troopers to come into contact with minorities, and not stopping people just for being a minority – or sending out a police cruiser because black men are standing in the park wearing baggy shorts. An AP article at The Caledonian Express explains:
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — With its small but rapidly growing minority population, Vermont’s top law enforcement officials and lawmakers are trying to ensure the state’s African-Americans, Hispanic immigrants and other minorities don’t feel the sting of discrimination.
Yet discrimination appears to be finding its way into the actions of at least some members of Vermont’s law enforcement community and the percentage of African-American inmates in the state’s prisons is 10 times their rate in the population, a figure that has doubled in the past decade, statistics show.
So state police are setting out to improve training to ensure that there is a legitimate reason for troopers to come into contact with minorities — and when they do, that minorities are treated the same as white Vermonters…
…thousands of refugees and others have moved to Vermont and the same census found minorities made up 36.8 percent of the state’s new residents…
…[A] study of 50,000 traffic stops done by the Vermont State Police for the year ending last July found minority drivers were more likely to be stopped and ticketed and their vehicles searched than white drivers.
Appel said that in the past 2½ years, the commission he leads has received 10 complaints from black drivers or passengers alleging racially biased treatment by Vermont law enforcement agencies, a substantial portion of his organization’s caseload.
“We’d like to think we are an enlightened state and in many ways we are, but if you talk to people who are members of the communities of color … there are numerous examples of bad experiences that you and I as white folks wouldn’t have,” state Rep. Suzi Wizowaty…
…”The only counter to bias is looking at data and making the facts more available to your consciousness and taking into consideration the fact that you might be biased,” she said…
…”The state police get this, they are sometimes the only direct contact that a visitor will have with an official of Vermont,” [said Curtiss Reed Jr, the executive director of the Brattleboro-based Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity]…
…”How do you conduct your policing in such a way that people walk away from it feeling as though, ‘Oh, in Vermont I understand that public safety is of paramount concern irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation or any other characteristic’?”
[Robert Appel, the executive director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission] has worked for five years to address the issues with the chiefs of police in Chittenden County, where most of the state’s minority population lives. Those agencies are adapting.
“They get calls from community members saying there are three African-American men standing in the park wearing baggy shorts, please send a cruiser,” Appel said. “In the old days they would send a cruiser, but there’s no reason to send a cruiser without some indicator that they are engaging in criminal activity.”
Now the dispatchers have been trained to ask the caller if there is any indication a crime has been or is about to be committed. If the answer is no, the caller is told that no officers will be sent.
Then the dispatcher transfers the call to the shift supervisor, Appel said, “to explain what the Constitution says, which is if you’re not breaking the law you have a right to be left alone.” Read more here
Posted in police, Vermont | Tagged: law enforcement, minorites, police, prejudice, refugees, resettlement, Vermont | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on January 27, 2011
The “Lost Boys of Sudan” refugees have reached their tenth-year anniversary in the US. An article in the Burlington Free Press details the current conditions for the 24 young male Sudanese refugees resettled to Vermont in 2001.
They began to arrive 10 years ago this month, tall, painfully thin young men with skin as black as slate. Each owned only the clothes he was wearing, a plastic bag of immigration documents and a story that moved the world.
They were known then as the Lost Boys of Sudan, part of a generation of dispossessed children of the Dinka tribe, driven from their homes by civil war. They walked hundreds of miles across the scrub plains of east Africa in search of safety, then grew up in bleak refugee camps.
The 24 young men who flew into Burlington International Airport in the winter of 2001 had survived starvation, near-drowning, bombs from the air, lions on the ground, crocodiles in the rivers.
None had seen snow. Many had never used a doorknob, flushed a toilet or climbed a staircase, but all were driven by a common ambition, the mandate from their elders in the refugee camp to obtain a college education…
…A handful have found white-collar jobs to match their newly-earned university degrees. Others are in graduate school. Most cannot find professional work, even with college degrees. Some have left Vermont as a result, while a few have returned to southern Sudan as that region prepares to declare itself an independent country next month.
Two of the former Lost Boys are in prison…
…During their first months in Vermont in 2001, the young men lived in virtual isolation in rundown apartments where they had been placed by a refugee agency… Read more here
I also found the Lost Boys in Chicago in 2001 living in dilapidated apartments where they had been placed by the Heartland Alliance refugee resettlement agency.
Posted in Burlington, housing, housing, substandard, South Sudanese, Vermont | Tagged: Burlington, heartland alliance, Lost Boys of Sudan, refugee resettlement, refugee resettlement agencies, refugee resettlement program, refugees, resettlement, Sudanese refugees, Vermont | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Christopher Coen on August 4, 2010
According to an article in the New York Times a dedicated and highly qualified elementary school principal in Burlington, Vt has been let go so that the Burlington School District could qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools. The school’s student test scores were low allegedly due to a 97 percent poverty rate and large numbers of refugee children, many with little earlier education. Under current federal rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.
By all accounts, the school’s principle, Joyce Irvine, was an exemplary leader.
John Mudasigana, one of many recent African refugees whose children attend the high-poverty school, says he is grateful for how Ms. Irvine and her teachers have helped his five children. “Everything is so good about the school,” he said, before taking his daughter Evangeline, 11, into the school’s dental clinic.
Ms. Irvine’s most recent job evaluation began, “Joyce has successfully completed a phenomenal year.” Jeanne Collins, Burlington’s school superintendent, calls Ms. Irvine “a leader among her colleagues” and “a very good principal.”
Beth Evans, a Wheeler teacher, said, “Joyce has done a great job,” and United States Senator Bernie Sanders noted all the enrichment programs, including summer school, that Ms. Irvine had added since becoming principal six years ago.
“She should not have been removed,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “I’ve walked that school with her — she seemed to know the name and life history of every child.”
…Ms. Irvine wasn’t removed by anyone who had seen her work (often 80-hour weeks) at a school where 37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children and where, much to Mr. Mudasigana’s delight, his daughter Evangeline learned to play the violin. here
Unfortunate for schools with already low test scores, and that receive a large influx of refugee students, rules do not allow schools to leave out refugee students from testing. Refugee students have to take tests, in English, that they are not prepared for and have no way of understanding.
Under No Child rules, a student arriving one day before the state math test must take it. Burlington is a major resettlement area, and one recent September, 28 new students — from Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan — arrived at Wheeler and took the math test in October.
Ms. Irvine said that in a room she monitored, 15 of 18 randomly filled in test bubbles. The math tests are word problems. A sample fourth-grade question: “Use Xs to draw an array for the sum of 4+4+4.” Five percent of Wheeler’s refugee students scored proficient in math.
About half the 230 students are foreign-born, collectively speaking 30 languages. Many have been traumatized; a third see one of the school’s three caseworkers. During Ms. Irvine’s tenure, suspensions were reduced to 7 last year, from 100.
Students take the reading test after one year in the country. Ms. Irvine tells a story about Mr. Mudasigana’s son Oscar and the fifth-grade test.
Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes, she said, but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.
The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true,’ ” she recalled. “So he got the five follow-up questions wrong — penalized for a lack of experience.”
Thirteen percent of foreign-born students, 4 percent of special-ed students and 23 percent of the entire school scored proficient in reading.
Indiana Senator Richard Lugar has recommended that refugee students be kept separate from other students until they can catch up (here), and not be tested until then so that their scores will not negatively impact schools’ ratings. What worries me about that is the opposite and equally damaging practice in which refugee students receive low-quality teaching, as noted in an article about schools in Buffalo here. Although the Senator is recommending that the federal government require that schools use “best practices” to guide refugee children’s separate but equal programs, how well would the government enforce that?
If the refugee program itself is any guide, not very well I presume.
Posted in Burlington, children, education, Ethiopian, funding, government, reform, school for refugee children, schools, Somali, Sudanese, Vermont | Tagged: Burlington, education, Joyce Irvine, No Child Left Behind, principal, Race to the Top, refugee children, refugees, resettlement, schools, Senator Bernie Sanders, stimulus, Vermont, Wheeler Elementary School | Leave a Comment »
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