This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Meet KaPaw Htoo • For typical American teenagers, high school holds both excitement and liberal doses of adolescent angst. Now imagine being dropped into that social pressure cooker with little schooling, no English, and no knowledge of the local culture. The Salt Lake Tribune is documenting the journey of Burmese teen KaPaw Htoo, 16, as he copes with his first year of high school in Utah. In this first in an ongoing series, he contends with the first day of school —twice.

Murray • KaPaw Htoo sits in the back of math class at Cottonwood High. His pencil is poised, but he writes nothing. He stares intently at his teacher, but he doesn't register a word.

The 16-year-old speaks almost no English. Just two months earlier, he lived in a refugee camp in Thailand where he was born to parents fleeing violence in nearby Burma. Now he's enrolled at an urban high school with 1,600 teens where no one knows his history, and the language barrier is as vast as the distance between Utah and Asia.

Teacher Yuri Perez asks students to help him simplify an equation on the white board: 3b+4c-c-2d.

But in his home country, KaPaw Htoo never made it through third grade. He is barely literate in his native language, Karen. He knows single-digit addition, but cannot complete a multiplication table or carry a one to add double-digit numbers.

On Aug. 30, he's a week late for the first day of school — but years behind his classmates in the 11th grade.

KaPaw Htoo (pronounced CAW-paw TOO) is one of a number of young refugees who enroll in Utah schools every year, with varying degrees of education and English skills. In the past decade, 8,100 refugees — legal immigrants fleeing persecution or war — have arrived in Utah from 42 nations, including a thousand from Burma, according to the Utah Refugee Services Office. Gerald Brown, office director, estimates that about 30 percent of the newcomers are children younger than 18 and that 99 percent of all refugees live in the Salt Lake Valley.

Little data is kept about how well these displaced students fare in our public schools. How do they perform on math, science and English tests? How many reach graduation? The answers are hidden somewhere in results for ethnic minorities and children with limited English skills, groups that are followed under No Child Left Behind. Schools are not required to track refugees as a separate category.

Yet acquiring education and English skills are key hurdles to refugees' success. The unemployment rate of refugees in December 2008, 15 percent, was nearly double that of the rate nationally, 7.2 percent, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement's 2011 report to Congress.

School placement • In Utah, schools generally place students based on their age, no matter how poor their language skills or what they know academically. They are entitled to a free public education until the year they turn 18. That means KaPaw Htoo has far fewer years — just two — in Utah's public schools than his younger sister and three brothers, who are ages 12, 9, 8 and 3.

With two years to learn English and complete four years worth of high school credits, it's doubtful he will graduate with his class. He may need to complete a high school diploma or pass the General Educational Development (GED) test in a district-sponsored adult education program.

Although refugees have been arriving for more than a decade, schools are still developing strategies for how to best serve refugee students during the time they have.

In Utah, Granite and Salt Lake City School Districts — who have the highest concentrations of refugees — have been grappling with the challenge the longest. Granite has 759 refugees in grades K-12 and Salt Lake City has 804. In contrast, Canyons district has 28. Other districts in the Salt Lake Valley do not have a count.

Salt Lake City boosted its monitoring of refugees' last year, says assistant superintendent Kathleen Christy. With a senior class of 78 refugees, 57 graduated on time. Among all refugees who took the state's standard exams in 2010, 45 percent were proficient in language arts, 34 percent were proficient in math and 17 percent were proficient in science. The test is not given to students who are in their first year of learning English.

The district has refugee advocates who speak the languages of many students and help explain the educational system to parents. Teachers, too, take time to visit students at home and get to know their families, says Josie Wankier, an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher at West High.

"Education is a dynamic, organic thing that continues to change," she said. "The way we taught our kids 50 years ago is completely different than the way we need to teach to meet the needs of our students now."

Granite is the only district in Utah to try — and then close — a newcomer academy for newly arrived refugees and immigrants over concerns the district would be accused of segregation. But it's a strategy that's still being urged by advocates here. In October, 100 service providers and educators held a meeting called by the Utah Office of Refugee Services to brainstorm ways to help refugee youths toward promising futures and careers. A newcomer academy was a common goal. Rising problems with drugs and gang violence, particularly among refugees in the 18-21 age group, has prompted the office to redouble its efforts with youth.

Brown, the refugee services director, says he has attended four funerals for young refugee men in the past two years due to violence or drugs.

"We're determined to do something about it," Brown says. "There's no single answer, but I think if we can put a lot of different things together, then we do have a real chance."

Part of it is helping students succeed academically, he says. Too often, youths become frustrated when they cannot compete with their peers in school. They find other ways to stand out.

Help from friends • Because so many refugees attend Cottonwood, KaPaw Htoo easily finds friends who speak his language. They interpret instructions for him and help him complete homework assignments. Soon after he starts school, another Karen boy his age, Kloe Moo Doh, moves into his Holladay apartment complex. They have to get up early to catch a UTA bus to Cottonwood. They hang out together at lunch and sometimes play basketball after school.

KaPaw Htoo begins picking up English words. He knows "yes," "no," "eyes," "nose," numbers up to 100 and answers "good" when asked "How are you?" But seemingly simple routines at school confound him. On his first day, he is shown how to use a combination to open his locker, but he never uses it again. Either he doesn't see the point or he hasn't mastered the combination. For nearly two months, he doesn't eat lunch at school. Even though he qualifies for free meals and has been shown how to get lunch in the bustling cafeteria, he's unsure if lunch is free every day.

He also says it is not customary in his family to eat breakfast, so he skips an after-school tutoring opportunity because he is too hungry to stay. Most days, he spends lunchtime outside with other refugees playing buka ball, a hackey-sack-like game common in Thai camps.

Finally, a school interpreter, Paw Law Eh, shows KaPaw Htoo near the end of October how to use his code to get lunch. The teen picks pepperoni pizza and says the food is good. It's different from what they ate in the camp — rations of beans, fish paste, rice, dried chile peppers and oil.

Although KaPaw Htoo lives within Olympus High's boundaries in Holladay, he opted to attend Cottonwood because if offers additional language services, including three instructional aides who speak Karen, Burmese, Nepali, Swahili, Arabic and Spanish. ESL teachers teach not only English courses, but math, science, health and social studies. The "pre-emergent" math and science classes are directed toward students who are not yet at grade level. Last year, five of the 22 seniors in the program, known as the Language Academy, graduated.

Students will develop basic English skills during their first year, says ESL teacher Angella Hamilton, but it takes seven years to develop the academic vocabulary needed to learn content in core subjects.

"Elementary kids learn maybe 2,000 words a year. You get up to high school and you have to know 20,000 words in order to survive in a mainstream academic environment," says Hamilton, who teaches KaPaw Htoo's U.S. history and American Experience classes. "The less education they've had, the greater the challenge it is for them to come here and graduate."

It helps, she says, for ESL teachers to teach core classes, such as social studies and math, so that students can start building their vocabularies across subjects.

In Hamilton's history class, she spends time quizzing students aloud on words they need to know before she teaches a lesson. With a geography unit, students learn words like "continent," "mountain" and "ocean."

Even though Cottonwood has experience with refugees, kids still get lost.

On Sept. 20, KaPaw Htoo and his mother, 34-year-old Paw Lae, go to midterm parent-teacher conferences. Pawbaw Wah interprets as teachers discuss the student's progress. (In Karen culture, the entire name is treated as a first name; families do not share surnames.)

"He is a very, very good student. He listens very well," says Perez, KaPaw's math and science teacher. "Right now, since he is learning English, I don't know how much he understands. But I am sure that in a few months, probably four months, he is going to speak very well."

The teacher adds that, in about a month, he plans to ask KaPaw Htoo to sit with students who don't speak Karen so that he will have to figure out his homework on his own. Interacting with other students in English will help him learn the language, Perez says.

KaPaw Htoo's report card shows he has a 2.76 GPA, earning A's in English, science and American Experience, B's in U.S. history and math, and a C in Beginning Oral ESL. For now, his grades are based largely on participation and simplified assignments. But he's missing a grade in aerobics and has an F in the life skills class "adult roles" — neither class is on KaPaw's schedule so he has never shown up.

Somehow, his schedule was changed about a week after he started school, but no one ever told him. No one can explain the mix-up, and none of his teachers noticed. Only three of his eight periods haven't changed time slots or subject.

"He feels bad, like he's not going to that class he's supposed to go to," Pawbaw Wah says, interpreting for KaPaw Htoo.

First day of school, again • While urban schools have grown accustomed to educating children who speak dozens of languages, arriving with no transcripts, some rural Utah schools are enrolling refugees for the first time.

In October, KaPaw Htoo's father, Ka Myee, is one of a dozen Burmese refugees hired to work at Park City Dry Cleaning and Linen, a Heber company that serves resorts and dry cleaning shops in Park City. With the help of a job developer who works at the direction of the Utah Refugee Services Office, the families find housing in walking distance, barely a tenth of a mile down the road. Ka Myee, 40, works as a presser.

KaPaw Htoo has to leave his first home in Utah to move to Heber. The family will leave behind the three-bedroom apartment in Holladay that's plastered with little notes to help them with vocabulary words: "lock" hangs above the door's dead bolt and "money" is next to a plastic bag of coins that is taped to the wall. When the family moved in, their caseworker from Catholic Community Services, a refugee resettlement agency, showed them how to use the microwave, the stove and make the bed with linens. In Thailand, they lived in a house made of bamboo and leaves.

KaPaw Htoo says he is nervous about the move. "I like to go to school here because I have a lot of friends," he says through Paw Law Eh. "We are happy together. They help me with my homework."

His arms still bear the marks of friends from Thailand where, at age 12, they gave each other black-ink tattoos.

On Nov. 17, KaPaw Htoo is in Heber facing another first day of school. An icy blue-and-pink-streaked sunrise greets him as he boards his first school bus to ride to Wasatch High at 7:20 a.m. His head is covered by the hood of his white sweatshirt in the 18-degree cold. Kids crowd near the door after the bus pulls up. One boy calls out, "Ready, set, go" and the kids push up the steps. No one talks to the new student on the ride to school.

Principal Shawn Kelly says KaPaw Htoo is Wasatch High's first refugee student. And longtime Wasatch district officials say they are not aware of ever serving refugee children other than those arriving this fall with the influx of Burmese workers.

KaPaw Htoo's first class is a study hall for English language learners with LuAnn Brandt, a Spanish teacher who has an ESL endorsement. "This will be new for me. My students speak Spanish," Brandt says in an interview.

Brandt spends most of the 80-minute class working with KaPaw Htoo, coaching him in English, while three other students study with another teacher. She quizzes him on everyday items using picture flash cards and has trouble not slipping into Spanish when she wants to be clear. "OK, bueno," she says.

While they are working, one of KaPaw Htoo's classmates walks over and hands him a bag of plain M&M's.

"Welcome to the United States," says 16-year-old Ricardo Maciel, whose family moved to Utah from Mexico only five months before KaPaw Htoo's. The refugee takes the candy and smiles.

Within the day, Ricardo and classmate Luis Mijares are not only KaPaw Htoo's friends but his guides at Wasatch High. They walk him to physical education even though they are in other classes. They wait for "Coach" Tom Perkins to arrive so they can help KaPaw Htoo ask for a gym locker. Perkins urges the kids in the class, all boys, to give KaPaw Htoo a warm welcome.

"He's a refugee from Burma. That means he lost his home or his family, I don't know," Perkins says. "Think about if you were in that situation. Show some courtesy."

A few come by to give the new student a fist bump. David Sanders, 16, leans over to shake his hand. "Hi, I'm David."

In an interview about his first day, KaPaw Htoo says he misses his friends in the Salt Lake Valley, and hopes to visit them someday, but feels he has made new friends at Wasatch. Hla Wei, the family's Catholic Community Services caseworker, interprets by phone.

With smaller classes at Wasatch, KaPaw Htoo notices that teachers spend more time with him. His beginner English classes have four to six students. At Cottonwood, most of his ESL classes had 20 to 30 students.

"I like it [here] because I've got two English classes each day and then during class my teachers show me how to read. They help me improve my English," he says. "If I try hard, I will learn English very fast."

Paw Lae says she is happy for the opportunity her children have to go to school and live without fear. When she was 10 years old, she and her mother fled Burma after her father was killed by Burmese soldiers. In the refugee camp, she worried nightly for her children's safety.

"Whatever they want, they can do. Wherever they want to go, they can go. They have so many chances," Paw Lae says through an interpreter. "I want to see [KaPaw Htoo] … getting an education and growing up to have a professional job and a good life."

About Burma

Burma, also known as Myanmar, has been in the spotlight this week as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton paid the isolated nation its first visit by a top U.S. diplomat in 50 years. She called for the release of political prisoners and the end of violent campaigns against ethnic minorities.

The nation has been governed by an authoritarian military regime, in one form or another, since 1962, although elections in 2010 have led to hope of new reforms. In the past, the government has suppressed movements for democracy, including killing more than 1,000 demonstrators in 1988. There also has been ongoing ethnic conflicts between the predominant Burmans and minority groups such as Karen, Karenni, Chin and others. Burmese authorities have repeatedly violated human rights, including "extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rape, torture and incommunicado detentions," according to the U.S. Department of State.

More than 2 million people, many of them ethnic minorities, have fled Burma to Thailand, Bangladesh, India, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and other nations, the department reports. There are roughly 150,000 Burmese living in nine refugee camps in Thailand near the border with Burma.

Source • Associated Press and U.S. Department of State, "Background Note: Burma," Aug. 3, 2011. —

How to help

To volunteer or make donations to help refugee families in Utah, contact one of the following service providers:

Utah Refugee Services Office • The state agency needs help replenishing an emergency fund for refugees. Tax deductible donations can be made to Refugee Services Fund, care of Gerald Brown, Refugee Services Office, Department of Workforce Services, 140 E. 300 South, Salt Lake City, UT 83111.

Catholic Community Services • http://www.ccsutah.org or 801-977-9119.

International Rescue Committee • http://www.theirc.org/slc or 801-328-1091.

Asian Association • http://www.aau-slc.org or 801-467-6060. —

Meet KaPaw Htoo

For typical American teenagers, high school holds both excitement and liberal doses of adolescent angst. Now imagine being dropped into that social pressure cooker with little schooling, no English and no knowledge of the local culture. The Salt Lake Tribune is documenting the journey of Burmese teen KaPaw Htoo, 16, as he copes with his first year of high school in Utah. In the first of an ongoing series, he contends with the first day of school — twice.