New Haven’s new science magnet school will open as scheduled this fall in a temporary home, with future engineers having the option of learning basic Arabic from a recently arrived Iraqi refugee.
The Engineering and Science University Magnet School — a collaboration between New Haven’s Board of Ed and the University of New Haven — is beginning with its first class, 88 sixth-graders. According to Will Clark, the Board of Ed’s chief operating officer, space has been rented to house them temporarily in the old St. Louis School on Saw Mill Road in West Haven.
Click here for a previous story with background on the school.
This is only a temporary location, Clark noted in an email message. Next year the kids will move into one of the BOE’s swing spaces while a permanent building for the new school is sought. Ultimately the school will have 616 students, from sixth to 12th grades. Its location in West Haven will build on the formal partnership with the University of New Haven, located there.
The idea is to have mentorships, an early college program where the high school kids will receive UNH credit for courses, and, in general, help prepare kids in underserved populations to enter demanding scientific and technological professions. The principal is Marjorie Edmonds-Lloyd.
For foreign language, the kids will be able to choose Spanish or Arabic to learn in this first year. They luck out with Husham Hussain, whom Board of Ed member Richard Abbatiello, a booster of the international vitality in the schools, brought in via Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS). (Hussain and Abbatiello are pictured at the top of the story.)
He introduced Hussain to a crowd of some 75 people at a recent event at the main public library branch. Abbatiello and his wife, Theresa Cappetta, and Simon Samoeil, curator of the Near Eastern collections at Yale’s Sterling Library, were presenting a travelogue of their recent trip to Syria.
Hussain arrived in New Haven, via IRIS, in April, having spent a year in Syria as a refugee. Before that he was one of 33 Iraqi Fulbright scholars, who in 2005 received the scholarship via the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Hussain, who was studying American literature, went to the University of Arkansas for a year. When he returned, in 2006, his two sons, Sunni, like him, had already fled for their lives to Sweden.
“One was a barber,” said Hussain, “and they — Al Qaeda, I think — made him stop shaving men’s beards.”
Hussain took his wife and three other children, Emily, Ahmed, and Bakr, to Syria. Ultimately, through the programs of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, he was resettled, through IRIS in New Haven.
He met Abbatiello at IRIS, where he continues to translate for other Iraqis being resettled in the Greater New Haven area. His older children are young adults, just out of high school seeking work. Bakr, age 9, is a student at the international center at East Rock Magnet School, where Abbatiello is also a frequent visitor and booster.
Hussain said the U.S. will be his new country because religion has overtaken Iraq. “Personally,” he said, “I am a secular person. I do not favor one religion over another, not Christianity, not the Koran. There are many secular Iraqis, by the way, who when they said a version of this, they lost their lives.”
With many of his cousins killed by the Mehdi Army, an uncle just picked up by strangers and “vanished,” Hussain prognosticated a gloomy future for Iraq. The U.S., he said, helped break many things, and unleashed the sectarian conflict. “If they withdraw now,” he predicted, “there will be a massacre.”
In addition to teaching at the Engineering school, Hussain writes about literature and hopes to land some college teaching positions as well. He loves Melville, Hawthorne, and the novels of Toni Morrison.
To be sure, the future engineers in New Haven’s newest school, will be learning a lot, in addition to elementary Arabic, from their new teacher.
In the second semester, the plan is for Hussain to teach at Vincent Mauro School as well. In addition to these two schools, Arabic is also taught in other schools throughout the NHPS, specifically at Metropolitan Business Academy and at Career High School, as well as at magnets. According to Will Clark, where a particular language is taught in the system depends, in large part, both on grant opportunities and on the interest of the school’s administrators.