Special Issue on Hmong Newcomers to Saint Paul Public Schools] Supporting Hmong Newcomers Academic and Social Transition to Elementary School

Abstract

When elementary aged Hmong children were resettled in St. Paul Public Schools after the closing of the Wat Tham Krabok refugee camp in Thailand, their families largely enrolled them in either a Transitional Language Center or a Language Academy program. This study reports on the perceptions teachers and educational assistants had about how well these programs met the needs of this unique population of newcomers. Findings show that the Transitional Language Centers were better able to ease the adjustment to school for the Hmong newcomers because of the safe, bilingual environment they created. In anticipation of the arrival of approximately 1,000 Hmong newcomers from the Wat Tham Krabok (hereafter, ―the Wat‖) refugee camp in Thailand, the Saint Paul Public School District (SPPS) joined together with a wide range of stakeholders to develop an education program that would specifically address the needs of their new students. 1 The committee created what they believed would be ―a Cadillac model‖: the best possible program for incorporating the language, academic, health, social, and emotional needs of the Hmong children and their parents, all under one roof within a traditional elementary school. 2 What resulted from these conversations was the establishment of Transitional Language Centers (TLCs) at five elementary schools during the 2004-2005 academic year and two in the 2005-2006 academic year. The TLCs were intended to be temporary programs specifically tailored to the Hmong newcomers from the Thai refugee camp. 1 Bigelow et al.: [Special Issue on Hmong Newcomers to Saint Paul Public Schools] S Published by Purdue e-Pubs, 2008 Special Issue on Hmong Newcomers 2 Bigelow, Basford and Smidt: Supporting Hmong Newcomers’ Academic and Social Transition Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement, Vol. 3(2008) The TLCs were completely new in the district. However, they did not replace the longstanding and highly regarded Language Academy (LA) programs that typically serve newcomers from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, Hmong parents were given the choice to enroll their children in either program. 3 This fact offered the unique opportunity to compare how a group of newcomers with similar backgrounds fared in two programs tailored for newcomers at the elementary grades. In particular, we were interested in discovering the features within the TLC and LA programs perceived by educators to be important in meeting the educational needs of the Hmong newcomers.