By Niamh Fleming-Farrell
Editor’s note: The following piece is the sixth installment in a series focusing on Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
BEIRUT: The playground and hallways of Laylaki Public school in Beirut’s southern suburbs are shrouded in typical summer vacation silence. But if you venture inside the building and ascend to the first floor you’ll find a hive of industrious activity. Tucked into six classrooms are more than 100 Syrian students, working hard to close the gaps in their education wrought by the conflict in their home country.
Since April, the Lebanese nongovernmental organization Amel has been running an accelerated learning program, or ALP, for refugees at the school. The objective is to prepare the students, who have missed months or even years of school, for integration into the Lebanese system in September.
But despite enthusiasm for the program – there are more than double the number of students attending classes on a waiting list – Amel’s education officer at the school, Myrna Hammadi, says there is a huge amount of work to do if these children are to be adequately prepared to follow the Lebanese curriculum, and she’s not sure there’s enough time to do it.
The main difficulties present in languages. In English, through which many subjects are taught in Lebanese public schools, even students in grade 5 lack the basics, Hammadi says.
“The teachers have to teach them the letters because they don’t know them,” she adds.
Even in Arabic, there are problems: “Some don’t know how to write between the lines. ... They have forgotten it.
“Others don’t speak Arabic at home, they speak Kurdish,” Hammadi explains, noting also that even for native Arabic speakers the Lebanese accent can cause confusion.
And beyond the academic challenges, she adds, lie a raft of psychosocial needs as children struggle to adjust to a new environment and circumstances while often carrying with them traumatic experiences from Syria. Amel employs social workers and psychologists to meet these needs.
But one thing that is not lacking on the first floor of Laylaki is enthusiasm – there are no struggles with poor attendance at this school, Hammadi says. The biggest issue is that with class sizes limited to 30 students, newcomers must join a rather long waiting list.
The program at Laylaki is just one of dozens of similar initiatives ongoing across the country.
UNHCR spokesperson Joelle Eid told The Daily Star that to date more that 45,000 Syrian refugee children and adolescents nationwide have participated in informal education initiatives including ALPs and remedial classes.
Amel alone is implementing supplementary educational programs through centers in the south, the Bekaa Valley and Beirut, reaching some 2,000 refugee students, the organization’s project coordinator Sam van Vliet told The Daily Star.
World Vision is also running ALP projects, with close to 1,000 children now enrolled, according to its communications manager Patricia Mouamar.
Working in three-month cycles, World Vision’s ALPs cover math, the sciences, English and Arabic, as well as psychosocial activities which Mouamar describes as a “major component.”
Like Hammadi, Mouamar says that despite it being the summer, there is no challenge filling the classes: “After missing out [on education], parents are keen and children are keen.”
She describes a recent moment in the tent of a refugee family at an informal settlement in the Bekaa Valley. As Mouamar told the mother about the program, the woman’s children were literally jumping with excitement, the World Vision spokesperson recalls.
At Save the Children too, the uptake has been remarkable, with 3,000 students benefitting from 3-month and 6-month ALPs over the past academic year. The NGO says it now faces challenges in meeting demand, both due to the number of students wanting to participate and the limited availability of qualified teachers. Providing transportation to and from the programs is also costly, it says.
Last year only a fraction of the Syrian refugee community enrolled in the formal school system in Lebanon, despite an Education Ministry decision obliging public schools to accept children from Syria.
Although the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there are some 150,000 school-age Syrian refugees in the country, only 30,000 of these were enrolled across 1,000 Lebanese public schools last year, with just 900 in secondary education, a source at the Education Ministry told The Daily Star.
The source adds that it is unclear how many of these students had actually stayed the course for the full academic year, although she says approximately 250 Syrians sat the official state exams administered in grades 9 and 12.
With ALPs only really getting underway over midway through the school year, due in large part to ongoing teacher strikes according to Mouamar, it remains to be seen if and how they will affect public school enrollment come September.
What is clear is that Syrian refugees, whether coming from an ALP or not, will have to pass an entrance exam before being admitted to their grade level, the ministry source says.
However, the ministry source, who asked not to be identified because she is not authorized to speak to the media, also assures that even with UNHCR estimating 450,000 school-aged Syrians in the country by the end of 2013, the public school system is capable of accommodating the refugee population.
The source estimates that at present are approximately 300,000 students in total enrolled in public schools.
“We have a lot of schools that are not full and we will open second shifts based on needs,” she says, but quickly adds that the introduction of second shifts would be contingent upon the international community providing the funds to finance them.
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19/07/2013
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