Refugees from Somalia face challenges in SOLs
As kids all over the nation started school last week, 11 year old Fahamo Mberwa was no different. She is a fourth grader this year at a Roanoke city elementary school, and like the other fourth graders in her class, at the end of the year she will take the Standards of Learning tests in English Reading and Writing, Math, Social Studies, and Science. Most of the fourth graders at this school will pass their SOLs and go on to fifth grade with no trouble. Fahamo however is a little different.
She and her five younger brothers and sisters are Somali Bantu refugees from Da’daab, a refugee camp in the Kenyan desert. At eleven years old Fahamo is one of the older fourth graders, but can barely read the simple books her teacher has brought her from the kindergarten classroom. She can do basic addition and subtraction math problems and has started memorizing her multiplication tables, but she has little or no knowledge of history or science. The most basic facts about the earth amaze and confuse her, such as the idea that the world is round.
“Like a ball?” she asks “The earth is round like ball?” She laughs. “You crazy. We not stand on ball!” This year she is taking Virginia History, but she cannot find Virginia, or even the United States, on a map.
For Fahamo and others like her, the SOLs represent a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Not only must she be able to read, by herself, all the questions and answer choices, she then must understand what the question means, and finally, pick the right answer. Her first year of school she was exempt from taking all but the math portion of the SOL, which she was also allowed to fail, once, without being penalized. That first SOL test was read to her verbally and covered a range of math topics from basic addition and subtraction to word problems and probability. She answered just 16 problems right.
This year, Fahamo is past any exemptions or relaxed standards relating to her extreme disadvantages against the other students. This year she must take all 5 of the SOLs, and pass, or face consequences. For Fahamo, who still mixes up the letters ‘B’ and ‘D’ this goal is impossible. Even just taking the tests with someone reading the questions to her is difficult, due to the incredible gaps in her knowledge.
Dusty Fiedler, the co-pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church, the organization that is sponsoring Fahamo’s family, says “It’s phenomenal. You don’t realize how much American kids know that prepares them for school long before they get to kindergarten. I’ve worked with refugee families before, but working with the Bantu has been totally different, just because of the enormous gap between the Bantu lifestyle and American culture.”
The ESS teacher at Fahamo’s school puts it another way. “She has no concept of written language. How do you teach a child who doesn’t understand what reading is?”
For Fahamo, the struggle to survive in the American school system is much smaller than the concept of written language or the challenges posed by the SOLs. For Fahamo, this struggle is still measured by the conquest of individual letters. For Fahamo, the struggle at this moment consists of 5 simple letters. B-I-R-D-S. And then, she’ll move on to the next word.
For right now, this is all that matters in her world. The three letters she will hear all this year, SOL, are still unfamiliar to her, and right now she is concentrating on a much more important goal; reading her sister a story about B-I-R-D-S.
~ Melissa (Gold Cat) is an eleventh grade AP English student who is attempting to duplicate Joe Kennedy’s writing style. She works with a Somali Bantu family twice a week.
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