Imagine yourself as a 15-year-old refugee, newly arrived in St. Paul after a grueling journey from Afghanistan to Fort McCoy to Minnesota. You have been traumatized by the war in your country. Perhaps you have witnessed arrests or executions of family members. You have lost your home, your school, your friends, and everything that would not fit in the one small bag you carried to the airport. Now you face a new life in a new country and city — and a new school.
Newly arriving immigrants who are high-school-aged at arrival must cram English learning and high school education — and sometimes all 12 years of school — into the time before they turn 21 and age out of public schools altogether.
That’s where LEAP High School comes in. St. Paul’s LEAP High School is a special place for newly arriving immigrants from 15-20 years of age. Students from countries around the world, many fleeing violence and persecution, find community and understanding at LEAP.
Now the St. Paul school board plans to close LEAP as part of a closure and consolidation plan. Its community of students will be scattered among “language academies” in regular St. Paul high schools. This plan has been developed with little community engagement and should be paused to obtain greater input from parents — particularly immigrant parents — before any plan is finalized and adopted.
LEAP students study a regular high school curriculum, in all-English-language classes, trying hard to cram 12 years of education into four or five or six. LEAP students need specialized support for trauma and for this accelerated learning. “Language academies” focus on language learning and do not provide this across-the-curriculum and beyond-the-curriculum support.
Drastic cuts in immigration and the impact of the COVID pandemic have reduced enrollment at LEAP High School. Low enrollment is the stated reason for the planned closure. That is a short-sighted approach that fails to consider rapidly changing circumstances.
Drastic cuts in immigration and the impact of the COVID pandemic have reduced enrollment at LEAP High School. Both of those are ending. Immigration and LEAP enrollment can be expected to rebound over the next one to three years. The need for LEAP will remain high.
In 2021-22, Afghan refugees will arrive, possibly as many as 3,000 coming to Minnesota. That compares to a total of only 386 refugees arriving in Minnesota in fiscal year 2020 and only 268 in the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2021.
In addition, changes in immigration policies of this administration and the just-ordered increase in the refugee cap for 2022 indicate larger numbers of refugee arrivals in the years ahead.
Newly arriving immigrants who are high-school-aged at arrival need the personal and academic support offered by LEAP. Because of that support, more than 80 percent of LEAP graduates enroll in post-secondary education.
LEAP High School is a valuable resource not only for newly-arrived immigrant students, but also for our city and state. LEAP provides the specialized programming needed to accelerate learning and socialization for 15-to-20-year-old newly-arrived immigrants and refugees. LEAP’s enrollment fell because of drastically reduced refugee numbers over the past four years. Now that refugees are again being welcomed to this country — and especially with the influx of new arrivals from Afghanistan beginning this year — LEAP is needed more than ever.
Mayor Melvin Carter and council members strongly affirmed St. Paul’s commitment as a welcoming city for new immigrants and refugees on many occasions, including the 2019 city budget. LEAP is a big part of what keeps us a welcoming city. We call on the St. Paul Board of Education to look to the future, not just to the past four years. Our community cannot afford to lose LEAP High School.
Veena Iyer is executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. Also signing it were Jane Graupman, executive director, International Institute of Minnesota; Jaylani Hussein, executive director, CAIR-Minnesota; Eh Tah Khu and Alexis Walstad, co-executive directors of the Karen Organization of Minnesota; Robin Phillips, executive director, The Advocates for Human Rights; Ekta Prakash, CEO, CAPIUSA; Rosa Tock, executive director, Minnesota Council on Latino Affairs; Bo Thao Urabe, executive and network director, Coalition of Asian American Leaders.
