The school is equipped to respond to the students’ unique position as refugees. Teachers are careful to identify potentially triggering material, and a counselor is on staff to address the traumas that the students likely sustained when fleeing from conflict. The school also provides students with free lunches and snacks to address poverty affecting many refugee students which can create barriers to learning such as lack of nutritious food. Because the school is a specialty middle school, it is able to place students in “forms” based on literacy level and not age.  In an article for Gather Good, two former GVP students credited their success in college to attending the GVP. One student acknowledged the power of learning alongside other students “who are in the same boat with you.”

The school aims to help students process their trauma by integrating visual art and music into all areas of the curriculum, drawing on research which suggests that arts-based interventions help refugee students to process and express their emotions. The GVP has an arts coordinator, an artist in resident who writes songs especially for the GVP chorus, and the school partners with organizations such as The High Museum and the Synchronicity Theatre for field trips. I noticed one student in particular who struggled to engage in most of the class activities, and who often did not turn in work, light up whenever the students were asked to produce artwork in class. She often put the most time and effort into the drawings out of all the students in the class.

Despite the efforts of the school to create an affirming and healing space for students, there remain many challenges to this type of work. The teachers must be aware of the values which students’ families bring with them across the border. Parents might be nervous about the reproductive health curriculum taught in the health class, however the school also has an obligation to prepare students to enter high school as teenage girls. Another challenge is finding culturally responsive literature for the classrooms. Children’s’ literature is a predominantly white field, and most of the books in the GVP library feature white children from the west. In recent years there has been a greater push for diverse children’s literature. Activist efforts such as #1000blackgirlbooks  and We Need Diverse Books are pushing for greater diversity in publishing and access to books which reflect students identities and experiences. The GVP has not yet caught up to this wave by having a rich collection of books written by and for the communities they are serving. Finally, the very structure of the school raises problems. With an almost entirely white board of directors and staff, the school maintains the power over resources and curriculum building. In this way, the school mimics and upholds the very structures that it professes to resist. It raises important questions about most non-profits serving non-western communities of color: in what ways do they generate power with, and perhaps power over the communities they are serving?

Even with these unsolved dilemmas, it is impossible to deny the joy, learning, and friendships which are fostered every day at the GVP. While the students have different nationalities, dress, diets, and religious practices, they are able to find commonalities with one another. They love to play games, and they know which girl is best at picking words for hangman, or playing the guard in “the statue garden.” They share music with one another, and half of the students have binders sporting the pictures and logo of the popular K-Pop group “BTS.” Many of the students share a deep connection with their families, and agree that their mothers are their heroes. Even the category of “girl” seems to be meaningful across national borders, and the students find solidarity together in that identity.

The “Author’s Teas,” or showcases which the GVP puts on for donors and parents twice per semester, highlight the very best of the work being done by the GVP to preserve cultural identities while creating cross-cultural community. Students are all assigned short lines in English, and many voices shake as they struggle not only with the nerves associated with public speaking, but doing so in a foreign language. At the last Author’s Tea that I attended, students in small groups also sang verses in their native tongues. A mother’s face in the audience shone with pride. At another Author’s Tea, the students sang “This Land is Your Land,” which made my eyes tear up. Underneath the benign cuteness of the children’s choir was a radical assertion that no matter what the political discourse says on the matter, this land belongs to them, too.

Image taken from the Public Domain