Teacher launches downtown hub for refugee students

Standing in a Japanese grocery store surrounded by food labeled in written characters she couldn’t read, educator Julie Kasper learned a lesson that would impact the rest of her career: Language is access.

Almost 20 years later, she wants to offer that access to Tucson’s refugee and immigrant students in a new downtown space called CENTER: A Finding Voice Space. CENTER is an acronym for Collaborative Engagement to Nurture Talent and Educate Responsively.

Aug. 31 was the soft launch, with a grand opening planned for Oct. 1.

Kasper sees the space at 55 N. Sixth Ave. as a hub for parents, teachers, students, volunteers, resettlement agencies and anyone in Tucson who works with refugee youth.

Students can drop in for after-school or weekend tutoring, use a computer, join a club or just practice their English.

Resources and workshops for parents and educators will help both parties better understand the needs of refugee students navigating American schools. For Kasper, now the school coordinator for resettlement agency Refugee Focus, this has been a vision long in the making.

“We started to move forward with this idea of a neutral space that was available for any resettlement agency and any district and any kid and any family,” Kasper said of CENTER, which is a program of Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest.

SUGAR-CUBE PYRAMIDS

Kasper, 41, always planned to be a teacher, and other cultures always intrigued her.

“I remember studying Japan as a unit in third grade, and wanting to go to Japan,” she said. “That was always a thing in the back of my mind.”

She taught middle school in Japan for two years after studying women’s studies and sociology at the University of Arizona and graduating in 1995.

Some of her students hated the requirement to learn English. Other loved it and saw it as “their ticket to success.”

“I really noticed there that language is access and language is power, so having access to various languages gives you access to various ways of seeing the world,” she said. She also noticed that speaking English often provided additional opportunities.

Her own inability to read Japanese characters in that first year would later give her empathy for her refugee and immigrant students and their families. She remembers “that feeling of vulnerability and that childlike state” of squinting at a package and wondering, “Is this something I want to eat?”

Kasper has since traveled around the world, spending summers in Germany, the United Kingdom and Indonesia for teacher training.

“I remember I studied Egypt also in elementary school,” she said. “I remember building a sugar-cube pyramid … and then I got to go to Egypt. I have always been really interested in the global community, languages, cultures and travel.”

Diverse worldviews

From Japan, Kasper moved to New York City, where she worked in public schools in Queens for about four years.

“My students came from everywhere, and they were just amazing, but their families were struggling, and they were struggling, and they just had these huge dreams but incredible obstacles,” Kasper said of her students, who were mostly immigrants, not refugees.

During that time, she got a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) master’s degree at Teachers College at Columbia University.

Her classrooms in Queens were multicultural, with as many as 30 different language backgrounds in one class. Like in Japan, Kasper found students who both embraced and resented learning English and about American culture.

“Maybe I’m drawn to conflict, but those kids always intrigued me,” she said of the students who opposed her. Without asking them to give up their cultural heritage and pride, she challenged them to consider the opportunities available to an English speaker.

And they challenged her right back.

“You plan a lesson with this framing question, and you think there is one answer, and they’re all going to come to a consensus around it,” she said. “Your 30 students don’t come to a consensus, because their worldviews are so vastly different.”

NOT “A DEAD-END TOWN”

When Kasper left Tucson after college, she never wanted to come back to the town where she grew up. She considered it “a dead-end town.”

But in 2005, family brought her back.

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To her surprise, she is happy to be here. “It’s a very different place as an adult than as a teenager,” she said. Here, her global experiences come together through her work with refugees.

Upon her return to Tucson, Kasper hunted for a school that would offer her the classroom diversity that she had in Queens. She settled at Catalina Magnet High School, working primarily with refugee students on English language development.

It was her first experience with the refugee community.

In 2006, she started a program called Finding Voice, giving refugee and immigrant students a forum to develop their voices through projects such as writing, public speaking, gardening and video.

“She gave me a lot of work,” said John Juma, a 2014 Catalina graduate who came to the U.S. from Kenya in 2010. He joked about the many essays Kasper assigned. “But she did good. That’s why I know how to write today. She pushed me a lot.”

Juma, 20, is now a student at Pima Community College and will work parttime managing CENTER and possibly serving on the youth editorial board for Finding Voice.

CENTER will be a hub and eventually a gallery for the Finding Voice program, allowing students across Tucson to participate.

“We had developed some awesome programs in our school that other kids couldn’t access,” Kasper said. “We needed something that was citywide.”

She stopped teaching at Catalina Magnet High School in 2014 and has spent the last year working as school coordinator for Refugee Focus, a division of Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest.

In that position, she became increasingly aware of the need for a central resource for Tucson’s refugee students.

And then, in March, she found her CENTER.

No-nonsense approach

CENTER’s next-door neighbor is Imago Dei Middle School. With a capacity for about 80 students, about 20 percent are refugees from Africa.

“Our African children and refugee children are arriving into a new city with a new culture and learning a new language,” said the Rev. Anne Sawyer, head of the school. “They’re maybe recovering and healing from past trauma that may have been part of their lives, and they’re often below grade level and stepping into a learning environment where they have to overcome multiple challenges.”

Among those are learning the language, adapting to a different school environment and making friends.

“When refugee families come, the focus really is on making sure that the family can support itself within just a few months,” said Connie Phillips, the president and CEO of Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest in Phoenix. “The focus is on making sure the adults in the family gain employment and a place to live. … Not a lot of attention is paid to the needs of children sometimes.”

Parents, too, may have questions about credits, college readiness, school paperwork or homework.

But these kids want to jump in, said Meg Riley, Catalina’s English language development coordinator and the parent and school development coordinator for CENTER.

“A lot of our refugee students come here with limited or interrupted education, so they are behind with a lot of their learning, not just languages,” Riley said. “These students just want to learn and are hungry for an education.”

The downtown space will also allow students to dabble in subjects they don’t have access to within the constraints of a school schedule. Results on English language proficiency exams may limit the time students have to access other subjects such as science, math and history.

Mariana Klipic, 21, had four hours of English language development at Catalina as a freshman until she passed the test.

“Then I had a normal schedule like everybody else,” she said. “I was so happy. I had art. I love art. I liked having normal history. It was so much fun. And having a regular math class, it was the best. It was like freedom.”

Klipic moved to the United States from Croatia when she was a child and originally spoke Serbian. She joined Finding Voice in 10th grade and loved the global camaraderie. Now she will now volunteer at CENTER.

“It’s amazing how they’re bringing it up from just a classroom where it all started to an actual building,” she said. “It makes me think there are going to be great opportunities for other refugee students.”

For her, Kasper’s thoughtful but no-nonsense approach changed everything. During Klipic’s freshman year, the teacher called her out on frequent ditching.

“I got motivated again because somebody actually cared for my education,” she said. “That’s how I got back into classes and back to doing homework and studying for tests and exams. It’s all because of her.”