Baheer said he wore the same outfit, including underwear, for 15-20 days without showering. They were given donated clothes and a blanket to keep warm at night, but look back at their time in Germany with grimaces, and have agreed never to return.
When the Hedayees finally arrived in the U.S. in 2022, the whole family said they immediately felt welcomed by American soldiers at Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia. The soldiers carried their bags to their hotel room and even bought them Afghan food, which Ahmad said they hadn’t eaten since beginning their journey.
Baheer remembered feeling so happy to finally take a shower after wearing the same dirty clothes for so long. The family then was transferred to Pennsylvania, where Ahmad said they were taken to a room with a large table full of snacks like chips and candy. The children asked if they could have some, but, after having to ration their food in Germany, they took only one bag of chips and a piece of candy. They were elated to learn they could eat as much as they wanted.
Ahmad requested a move to Washington since his brother lived here, and the International Rescue Committee set them up in an apartment complex close to Parkside Elementary, where Baheer and his sister Sama, 9, enrolled in January 2022.
Jennifer McLaughlin, senior program manager for youth and education at the IRC, said the process of resettling families into housing and enrolling the children in school can take months, often with several relocations along the way. The IRC has a partnership with Highline School District; McLaughlin said they began their work with one middle school in King County in 2023, and now it’s the county with the most people they serve.
Once a family is settled, they go through school orientation with a support team of social workers and staff members. This is also when families learn about the U.S. education system and a variety of other support services from language assistance to the school lunch program.
Challenges of refugee influx
More than 250 different languages are spoken in Washington, according to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Many immigrant children are eligible for the state’s Transitional Bilingual Instruction Program when they start school here, especially if English is not their primary language.
State law requires incoming students to be tested for their English language skills within 10 days of enrollment. Rosann Rankin, Parkside Elementary’s multilingual learning specialist, scrambled to test all of the new Afghan students when they arrived in those first waves. Students are grouped with others at the same English level for 20 weeks, where they gain a language foundation.
Parkside now has staff members who were parents of refugee students, or refugees themselves, who can speak Dari and Pashto and assist new arrivals. Since a majority of the incoming immigrant students are from Afghanistan, they pair up as language buddies to help each other outside of class.
McLaughlin said one of the challenges schools face is accommodating the large number of students arriving at the same time. IRC tripled their funding and increased staffing from 16 to 34 this year, hiring people who were also refugees. The number of students they serve this year has doubled since last year, to 930 students.
Her team has added trauma-informed linguistic support programs to their current student support to help students adjust to their new lives and improve their English.
“Oftentimes these kids, they really just want to go back home. They didn’t choose to come here. America wasn’t a dream for them,” McLaughlin said.
Jadenne Radoc Cabahug
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