By Will Carless
If anyone in San Diego knows the value of education, it’s Fatima Abdelrahman.
Five years ago, Abdelrahman arrived in City Heights from Darfur, Sudan, with her five children. None of her kids had ever been to school before arriving in the United States.
At first, her children struggled. They sat in classes at Fay Elementary School with blank looks on their faces. All around them, students jumped, played, read, learned. Abdelrahman’s kids didn’t even know how to ask to go to the restroom. They sat, alone, at recess, confused and cold in their new country.
As time passed, however, the children began to learn. They memorized the alphabet. Then grasped how to string together letters to form words. The strange, inelegant script of the English language began to take form, becoming familiar, then second-nature. The kids made friends, began to jump, to play.
Abdelrahman’s children are now thriving at schools across San Diego Unified School District, and every day’s education is precious. If they’re not at school, her children are cramped into the small duplex where she often also looks after children from other families. Or they’re out in the streets of City Heights, among the dark influences of drugs, gangs and violence.
Last month, Abdelrahman overcame her natural shyness to speak at a school board meeting. Addressing the trustees quietly from beneath her tiger-print hijab, she urged them to approve a deal to avoid more than 1,000 layoffs, including 27 of the 29 teachers at her beloved Fay Elementary.
A week later, the deal was done. Teachers agreed to forgo a series of raises and continue working a shorter school year so their colleagues could keep their jobs. Abdelrahman was delighted.
But while the agreement averted the catastrophe of layoffs, it also ushered in a whole new worry for parents like Abdelrahman. If Californians fail to pass either of two new tax measures on November’s ballot, the deal calls for the district to cut the school year by up to 14 additional days. For most schools, that would reduce the school year to 161 days of instruction — shaving nearly three school weeks from a calendar that was already among the shortest among the developed world.
A shorter school year would affect children across the district, but would have a particularly profound impact on children like Abdelrahman’s — English language learners whose parents rely heavily on schools and don’t have the resources to pay for summer camp or tutors to make up for lost instruction time.