Charleroi, Pa., educators and students show unity as community becomes embroiled in political debate over i – Butler Eagle

Last week, the quiet hallways of Charleroi High School briefly came to life when a bell rang, signaling the end of seventh period.

Hundreds of students in jeans, athletic shorts and pajama pants made their way to their next class, hugging and jostling each other before the hallways fell silent again.

It was a day like any other, even though her school — a sprawling campus with more than 1,500 students in preschool through 12th grade — has recently become a sticking point in the ongoing political debate over immigration in America.

In recent years, the small community on the Monongahela River in Washington County, Pennsylvania, has seen a surge in immigration from people seeking work and housing, sometimes fleeing danger in their home countries.

But earlier this month, former President Donald Trump held up Charleroi as a cautionary tale in his ongoing rhetoric about Haitian immigrants, a group he had previously accused – falsely – of stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

School administrators said that although the number of immigrants among students in their district has increased, they disagreed with Trump’s comments, which in Springfield’s case led to dozens of bomb threats and evacuations.

“We fear that Charleroi is becoming the new Springfield, and there are threats against the school,” said Superintendent Ed Zelich. “We don’t want to get involved in the political aspects of this. We serve the students.”

About 15% of the district’s 1,567 students in grades K-12 are immigrants, according to figures provided by Zelich. He said the district has about 225 students who are considered English language learners and come from countries such as Haiti, Venezuela, Brazil and Chile. Five years ago, the district had about a dozen ELL students.

To accommodate the growth, the district has spent about $400,000 for the 2023-24 school year to hire additional ELL teachers, an ELL coach and an interpreter. Before 2023, the district had one ELL teacher, and with enrollment expected to continue to grow, the district may need to hire another teacher next year, Zelich said.

The district’s general operating budget is approximately $30.7 million.

The growing number of new students brought challenges, but Zelich said the entire school community was supportive.

After the mother of a Haitian first-grader died of cancer in December, Charleroi’s deputy school principal Amy Nelson opened her home to the six-year-old and is now taking the girl in.

Nelson said the child could still remember crossing the Darién Gap – the only land bridge between North and South America, which is considered extremely remote and dangerous – with her mother, who was battling cancer at the time.

“She tells stories of her journey through the rainforest,” Nelson said. “She talks very openly about the insects, the dirty water, the people carrying her and not having enough food. I know she’s been through that, and then the devastation of losing her mother.”

Given the current political debate surrounding immigration, Nelson said she sometimes worries about the future of the child, who is named Sarah.

“I’ve heard comments like, ‘Shouldn’t she go back if her mother isn’t here?'” Nelson said. “I thought to myself, her mother gave up her life to come here. She knew she had tumors, but she didn’t stop because she wanted this for her daughter.”

Growing pains

Most of the Charleroi students seem relatively detached from the current discussions surrounding them and their classmates, focusing more on the school’s food offerings that day or whether the football team could make it back to the national championship after losing by one goal last year.

Marc Lelys, a 17-year-old forward on the soccer team, arrived at the school in November shortly after immigrating from Haiti. He said he struggled with learning English at first, but now he is focused on his plans to study and play soccer at Washington & Jefferson College.

When Marc arrived in Charleroi, he joined his mother, who had moved to the district about four years ago after hearing about job opportunities.

“It was magical,” he said of the moment he was reunited with his mother.

Other students who grew up in Charleroi were disheartened to hear Trump portray their hometown as a place that did not welcome newcomers.

“We should all be working to give our school more money to accommodate these students instead of trying to turn our city into a political battleground,” said Cade Carson, a 17-year-old 11th-grader who is vice president of the student council and a representative of the school’s board of directors.

Cade said he understands the arguments on both sides of the immigration debate, but hopes the community can come to a common solution.

“Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion… I kind of understand why people in the city might be upset about so many extra students, because it costs money to hire translators who can help a lot of people,” he said.

“But I would say, instead of going on the national news and hearing people on both sides complain, it would be very helpful if we just tried to find a solution where we can actually help these people and make sure everyone has a fair chance.”

Several teachers in the district rejected the claim that all new immigrants are of Haitian descent.

“A few years ago we might have had one student who didn’t speak English, now we have about nine in each kindergarten,” said teacher Elaine Ondrish. “In our building we speak about seven different languages. It’s not just Haitians. It’s everything. That’s just the world we live in today and it’s mistakenly assumed that it’s this one population when it’s not.”

Ondrish, a kindergarten teacher, also said that criticism that some students receive less attention from teachers due to the increasing number of students is unfounded.

“It makes me angry that so many outsiders think it’s such a burden,” she said. “It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of challenges, but when people say their kids don’t get the attention they do locally, that’s not true. … I think they should take an example from their kids and see how tolerant they are so they can be more tolerant themselves.”

While the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was at the high school last week, at least two new families enrolled their children in classes through interpreter Pierre Richard Mompleisior, who immigrated to Charleroi from Port-au-Prince about four years ago.

Mompleisior, 30, was a teacher in Haiti and speaks Spanish and French Creole. He said one of the biggest concerns of immigrant parents is whether their children will be able to learn a new language.

“I tell them, don’t worry about it,” Mompleisior said. “A five- or seven-year-old child can even learn three languages ​​at the same time… even teenagers can speak proper English in six months.”

As students’ English skills improve, so does their confidence, say English as a Second Language teachers Donna Bilon and Christina Sichi, who were at times touched by how much their new students appreciated both their new school and their new home.

Sichi said she was deeply saddened last year when she learned that one of her students, a fifth-grader from Haiti, was moving away. She said she asked the boy if he knew what he wanted to do when he was older.

“He said, ‘I want to join the military,’ and saluted,” Sichi said. “And I asked him if he wanted to go back to Haiti and join the military, and he told me, ‘No, I want to join the U.S. military and protect all of you who helped me.’ He was so sweet.”

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