At School: Here's how to say 'learn' in Nepali

By Mary Niederberger, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Lake Fong/Post-Gazette
Sarah Dunn, a social worker at Paynter Elementary School in Baldwin, helps Bhuwan Dahl, 7, from Nepal, color his weather project earlier this month.
Second-grader Bhuwan Dahl was busy last week learning about autumn by donning a sweatshirt, picking up fallen leaves and tracing them with crayons along with classmates at Paynter Elementary in Baldwin Borough.
Bhuwan was all smiles even though he was thousands of miles away from his homeland of Nepal, where his family lived in a refugee camp. Just four weeks into school at Paynter, he hasn't mastered English.
His comfort may have come from his experiences in the Welcome Center, a classroom the Baldwin-Whitehall School District created last year to meet the needs of refugee students who are placed in the district by Catholic Charities and Jewish Family & Children's Service.
The center is important in a district where 200 students are refugees, including 97 of the 704 students at Paynter.
Baldwin-Whitehall has the largest proportion of refugees -- nearly 5 percent of all students -- of any district in the county,and other districts, including Keystone Oaks, Mt. Lebanon and Penn Hills, are studying its one-of-a-kind center, said Paynter Principal Darlene DeFilippo.
Baldwin-Whitehall also is considering creating scaled-down versions at its middle and high schools.
Located near the school entrance, the center -- with salutations in world languages on one wall and international flags on another -- is the first stop for refugee students. It's where they are officially greeted by the staff and where they are assessed as they eat breakfast and participate in activities, including art, singing, dancing and play.
The children soon learn that it's the place they can come anytime they encounter a problem at school.
Most of the refugees live at the Prospect Park apartment complex in Whitehall, home to numerous refugee families for the past decade.
The initial influx of refugees to the district started in the late 1990s with Bosnians, followed by people from the Middle East. With those groups, the families generally had lived together in their own homes before they were forced from their native countries.
But in recent years, the arriving families have lived in refugee camps, sometimes for years. The most recent groups come from Nepal, Burundi and Myanmar.
While some lived in their own modest dwellings in the camps, others came from far more rustic camps, which meant students weren't familiar with such concepts as running water when they arrived at Paynter.
Two years ago, when Mrs. DeFilippo started to recognize that these refugee students were far needier than those in the past, she started to work with pupil services director Virginia Deasy and the district's social workers to devise a way to help them make the transition to life here.
"You can't expect children to become students unless they learn how to become a student. We had no formal way of getting the kids acculturated," Mrs. DeFilippo said.
From that effort, the Welcome Center was born. It officially opened last school year, and 27 refugee students passed through it.
There, students learn about school etiquette such how to stand in line or raise a hand to get the teacher's attention.
Some also need to learn how a water fountain, faucet, telephone or light switch works. The children learn about kitchen safety by pretending to make meals at a toy stove and sink.
The room also is equipped with other toys, books, an art-and-crafts area and multi-cultural dolls. It has materials about American culture although the children also take English-as-a-second-language classes.
For children who may not have the words to express themselves yet, Ms. Dunn uses flashcards with faces that express various emotions.
One important lesson is that the climate in Western Pennsylvania includes four seasons.
"Many of the students come from warm climates where they only wear sandals or flip flops," said social worker Sarah Dunn, who operates the center.
School officials, with the help of the school community and other social service organizations, make sure there is a ready supply of warm clothing and shoes for students whose families can't afford them.
School employees try to keep in touch with parents, even translating school handbooks and calendars into multiple languages for open house.
In Bhuwan's leaf activity, the real lessons Ms. Dunn was stressing were all about appropriate classroom behavior.
Because he followed all of his directions, Bhuwan earned five minutes of free play time after the organized session.
He is making steady progress toward what is the goal for all refugee students -- to be placed full-time in regular classes.
In addition to group activities, Ms. Dunn conducts one-on-one sessions to work on individual issues.
During one such session, Ms. Dunn talked with kindergartner Gogan Phuyal from Nepal about how his experience at Paynter was going, using a Nepali translator on a telephone.
Ms. Dunn and the child sat on a carpet with a phone between them. Before the translator became available, Gogan nodded his head to answer yes and no to Ms. Dunn's questions.
But once he heard the familiar sounds of his native language, he became animated and had a lively discussion.
Through the translator, Ms. Dunn learned that Gogan is happy at Paynter and "likes everything about school" but the American food.
Gogan told the interpreter he had solved his problem by bringing his lunch from home.
"That's great," Ms. Dunn exclaimed. "We want you to be happy here."
Gogan flashed a bright smile.