Syrian refugee students start school in Calgary

It’s a scary proposition for any child, starting life at a new school, particularly when you’re new to Canada and had to flee your war-torn home.

Syrian refugees have started to trickle into their new schools in Calgary. They’re currently being accepted at three schools after they finish the intake at Kingsland Centre.

Belvedere Parkway School in Bowness, Keeler School in Forest Lawn and Braeside School in Braeside have all opened their doors.

“Belvedere Parkway was identified because we had some extra classroom space, so we have new teachers and new programs joining us,” said principal Derek Rakowski.

The program for new Syrian students is called LEAD, otherwise known as Learning, Education, Academic and Development and will last twenty months.

“We have teachers who have been specifically trained around English development, around setting up the kids for a positive relationship and a positive school experience,” said Rakowski. “It’s a little different than a classroom which would be following the Alberta program of study because it’s much more open-ended.”

Rakowski says the teachers have also been trained around childhood trauma, allowing them to help these children who fled a war zone to transition into their new lives.

“The greatest thing about this, when I was announcing this to our students, our students really get that we have a lot of transition students because we’re in Bowness, we get a lot of movement,” he said. “So they’re really good. If someone comes in, they make friends with them right away. I had some students come up to me after I first announced it and they asked ‘Mr R, are they going to be in our classrooms?’ And I said ‘no, it’s going to be a special setting classroom but they’re going to be in our school and we can make friends with them’, and they just sat there and they clapped, you could see the joy on their faces.”

He tells 660 NEWS the students are excited, many of them have made welcome posters to help the refugee students feel more at ease.

Parents of Belevedere Parkway’s current population have even been calling the principal asking, how can they help and is there anything they can do.

LEAD will start from kindergarten on, allowing some of the younger children to come in and learn.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to set up and deal with a lot of these issues before these kids go to their community schools.”

“The whole school community is so excited about this, they’re extremely positive, I have not heard one negative thing. We had a parent in this morning asking to be able to come in to volunteer and work with the LEAD classrooms. We’ve had parents coming in and asking, do we need backpacks, do we need food, do we need clothing, how do we help? It’s just been such a positive experience in trying to get this all ready, the support has been absolutely phenomenal. I’ve had schools phoning, principals phoning, you name it! People are just 100 per cent behind this.”