By Nikita Mandhani

Firas Jawish arrived in Chicago with his family as a Syrian refugee in September 2014. Despite being a doctor, he makes ends meet by working in a data entry job at a clinic. One of his daily concerns is finding an appropriate school for his 3-year-old son, Hasan.

“We don’t want him to go to a play school,” said Jawish, explaining that he didn’t want him “to stop speaking Arabic.”

Switching between Arabic and some English, 35-year-old Jawish spoke of the confusion Hasan would go through if he were to learn English and Spanish in a public school and Arabic at home. Private Arabic schools are too expensive, he added.

When refugees come to the United States via the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), they are placed with a resettlement agency. The agency helps with housing, job search and school enrollments for their children in addition to providing other services that can help them lead a routine life.

More than half the Syrian refugees who were resettled in the U.S. between October 2010 and November 2015 are under the age of 20, according to a study conducted by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a non-profit educational organization headquartered in Atlanta, Ga.

For many of the children, the transition from Arabic to English is the toughest educational challenge. For others, it’s something as frustrating as the lack of legal documents to verify their ages.

“My younger son doesn’t have many friends in school because he can’t speak good English,” Dua Lababide, a 27-year-old mother of two, said in Arabic. Lababide came to Chicago about ten months ago with her husband and two sons, third-grader Anas Shaikh Subh and Yousaf Shaikh Subh, who is in kindergarten.

“The older one likes school more here,” she said of Anas, while noting that Yousaf doesn’t interact in school because he is scared that he’ll get a word wrong.

The Heartland Alliance in Chicago helped with their resettlement and the sons’ school admissions but Lababide credits the Syrian Community Network (SCN) for helping more with basic communication with school officials, something that she can’t do herself because of her poor English.

“We help them with parent teacher conferences,” said Suzanne Akhras, founder and president of the Syrian Community Network. “We have attended graduations. We celebrate with the families the achievements of their children.”

Akhras added that her organization provides several English assistance programs for Syrian refugee children so that it is easier for them to overcome the language barrier.

“We are starting our mentorship program,” she said, describing an upcoming program through which SCN volunteers will help refugee children with tutoring.

In addition to these efforts, Akhras’ organization tries to find relevant services like GirlForward, an organization that mentors adolescent refugee girls and provides educational programs and leadership opportunities.

For Kamar Leadda, a 17-year-old Syrian refugee who arrived in Chicago about two months ago, the school admissions process was perplexing. She said that she was supposed to be in the twelfth grade at Silvin High School but was moved back two years. Kamar struggles with English.

This is a common problem, according to Ashley Marine, the program coordinator at GirlForward.

“From the very beginning, enrollment can be hard for a refugee student based on their age and prior experience,” said Marine. “Here in the U.S., you might not have access to school reports from your home country. Even if you went to high school in your home country, you can’t prove it and you might not get to go to the same grade when you arrive.”

Marine points out that many girls at GirlForward have had limited or no access to education in their home countries. But, in the U.S. educational system, high school attendance is required for anyone above the age of 14, which can be challenging. Many refugees aren’t familiar with the customs of an American school and don’t know how to get ahead.

Despite the struggles of learning the English language, understanding American culture and adjusting to a different school system, Marine said that refugee children “have a great desire to learn” because in many cases education was something that was taken away from them.

Describing how a number of the refugee children want to become doctors, she said, “Girls that we serve see education as a pathway to a different life.”

Arabic to English translations by Bian Elkhatib