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Breshna Arghandiwal, a 25-year-old volunteer teacher at Noor Islamic and Cultural Community Center, helps students with the English alphabet in Concord in May 2022.
Maryam Mohammadi, age 9, plays duck duck goose at the Noor Islamic and Cultural Community Center in Concord during the organization’s second Saturday school session for elementary-aged children on May 21, 2022.
A student listens in at Noor Islamic and Cultural Community Center’s Saturday school session for middle and high school students in Concord on May 21, 2022.
At just past 10 on a Saturday morning, two dozen Afghan students began to write.
Some could understand the prompt, which was printed on the handouts before them in English. Others simply stared at it and tried to untangle the words. There were furrowed brows and jittery hands, but every face was set in focus.
It wasn’t what the students were used to doing in the mosque of the Noor Islamic and Cultural Community Center (NICCC), a nonprofit organization on Concord’s Treat Boulevard. But the students were there for a reason: During the past year, they had been forced from their homes in Afghanistan and resettled in California’s East Bay. And to succeed in their new country, they needed to learn English.
“Their parents said the main reason they left Afghanistan was because of their kids. They wanted to give their kids a future, an education,” said Sedique Popal, the president of NICCC. “When they came here, they found out the schools are open. But if they are limited in English, they can’t succeed.”
It’s been a year since the Taliban seized Kabul and reclaimed control of Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal in August 2021. Girls above the sixth grade have been expelled from Afghan classrooms. Even before the government collapsed, three decades of war had fractured the country’s school system. According to international humanitarian organization Save the Children, as many as eight million children need support to access education across Afghanistan.
More than 87,000 Afghans have arrived in the United States as part of Operation Allies Welcome, the federal government’s effort to connect Afghan refugees to resettlement services. Since they’ve arrived, children resettling in California have been funneled into the area’s school system, placed into English language programs with other new immigrants from around the world, the largest proportion of whom speak Spanish, according to the California Department of Education.
Soon after these children entered school, Popal started receiving calls from teachers, asking if NICCC could provide bilingual support for their students. During the 2021-22 academic year, the number of Afghan students entering the Mount Diablo school system skyrocketed. From 2020 to 2021, 44 Afghan children were enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade. But in the academic year following, that number shot to 144. The 227% increase left the school system scrambling.
Carmen Garces, the director of English Learner Services at the Mount Diablo Unified School District, said it has been difficult to find qualified bilingual teachers or social workers who speak Dari, Pashto or Farsi.
“I have had two positions open all year, but we haven’t been lucky enough to hire anyone,” Garces said.
According to the Learning Policy Institute, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an already critical teacher shortage throughout California. Half of the districts analyzed by the study reported shortages in bilingual education.
The area’s high cost of living, low pay for teachers and the draining nature of teaching during COVID-19 has contributed to the shortage, said Alberto Nodal, kindergarten teacher and chairperson of the California Teachers Association’s Hispanic Caucus. Nodal also pointed out that for bilingual teachers, credentialing comes into play. When teachers arrive from another country, often they are not qualified for teaching jobs in the United States — even with decades of experience.
“We don’t have any support. That’s the bottom line,” said Tammy Braun, a kindergarten teacher in Hayward.
One of Braun’s students, a 6-year-old boy from Afghanistan, struggles to communicate with Braun or his classmates — and every time he doesn’t show up to school, Braun has no way to reach him or his family. Braun estimates Mohammad has missed a month’s worth of school since January, something that has pushed him further behind the other students in his class.
“We need to find some translators so we can communicate with these families,” Braun said. “I don’t even know if his parents realize how far behind he is.”
NICCC tried to raise money for a program that would fill that gap, which originally planned to gather students after school three times a week. An Afghan refugee himself, Popal knew that with every passing day, students were losing irreplaceable time. The only reason he made it in America, he said, ultimately becoming a professor in linguistics at the University of San Francisco, was because of education.
If students cannot unlock the education provided to them, Popal feared they would be at greater risk of dropping out. Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that, historically, English learners have lower graduation rates than all students: in 2018, for example, English learners graduated from high school at a rate of 68% nationwide, as opposed to the 85% graduation rate for all students.
“One thing is bringing immigrants here … and providing them with essential needs — food, clothing and shelter,” Popal said. “That’s necessary. But I believe for these kids, it’s not enough. We need to provide education. That’s the thing that will make them productive citizens in this country.”
Children participate in the Noor Islamic and Cultural Community Center’s educational program in Concord on May 21, 2022.
After six months of fundraising, Popal decided to open NICCC’s doors to students with the funds they had, along with donations from the city of Fremont and the Hello Neighbor Network, a collection of nonprofits based in Pennsylvania. NICCC didn’t have the money to gather children three times a week, so they settled for one: Saturday mornings.
On May 14, the program began. NICCC gave students a set of four tests — reading, writing, speaking and listening — to assess their baseline understanding of English.
More than 70% of the students NICCC tested scored at level one, meaning they had no English literacy. The other 30% scored at level two, meaning they were slightly above the most basic level, but still cannot benefit from all-day instruction in English alone.
“What we found out is that there are kids that go to school from 8 to 3 everyday, but they cannot produce one sentence in English,” Popal said. “How would you feel if you sat in a classroom and the teacher is talking, and that talking is just noise, every single day?”
The language barrier isn’t just affecting students’ academics.
Maryam Noori, who resettled in Walnut Creek last fall, said her 6-year-old daughter Sufiya completely changed after leaving Afghanistan.
Like many families, the Nooris’ journey was arduous: upon leaving Afghanistan during the U.S. withdrawal, they spent 45 days waiting for their documents to be processed in Germany. After that, they waited another 33 days at a processing center in Virginia — a situation that led Noori, who was pregnant, to lose 22 pounds in one month.
They finally arrived in California, nearly three months after they fled from their homes. The sudden change, combined with the loss of family and friends, and the inability to communicate with anyone her own age, has been hard on Sufiya.
“We came in November, but she still doesn’t have any friends,” Noori said. “When I’ve asked her why, she says it’s because she can’t understand them, and they can’t understand her. She feels so alone here.”
Many of NICC’s Saturday-morning volunteers are Afghan refugees themselves, forced to leave their country after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970s.
“What these kids are going through, my parents went through that,” said Henah Akbar, a volunteer teacher at NICCC. “I feel a lot for the kids. They left their home abruptly, they wanted to escape the war, they came here for a better life. I’m just here to help them and make them feel welcome and comfortable.”
Some volunteers travel throughout Concord, driving to the children’s homes to knock on their doors, pick them up and travel back to the mosque. Others grab breakfast — pancakes, eggs or donuts for the children, and plenty of coffee for the teachers — and display them in NICCC’s de facto cafeteria. Still others arrive to teach, traveling from San Francisco, Palo Alto and even Turlock to make it there on time.
By 9 a.m., NICCC is buzzing with activity. After breakfast, 20 middle and high schoolers stream into the women’s mosque, and a nearly equal number of elementary school students filter into the men’s. Originally, NICCC had only planned to tutor the older children. But on the first day of classes, students showed up with their younger siblings in-tow.
“We told them we weren’t prepared for this, but they said they wanted to learn,” Popal said. “We set up a few tables, moved some tutors around, and made a plan.”
NICCC will continue to open its doors every Saturday until funding rounds out — in November. After that, the future of the program is uncertain.
“It was nice seeing the kids socializing, laughing,” Akbar said. “We don’t know how long it’s been since they’ve been able to do that.”
Elissa Miolene is a graduate of Stanford University’s journalism school and a former intern with The Chronicle’s multimedia team. Twitter: @elissamio
Elissa Miolene is a graduate of Stanford’s journalism school and a former intern with The San Francisco Chronicle’s multimedia team. Before Stanford, Elissa led digital storytelling at UNICEF’s End Violence Partnership, a fund focused on preventing violence against children, and worked in East Africa and South Asia at various humanitarian agencies. Elissa grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, and holds a master’s degree in policy and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Lehigh University.
