Refugee High
Coming of Age in America
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A year in the life of a Chicago high school with one of the nation’s highest proportions of refugees, told with “strong novel-like pacing” (Milwaukee Magazine)
"A stunning and heart-wrenching work of nonfiction."—Chicago Reader
Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize
Finalist, Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award
For a century, Chicago’s Roger C. Sullivan High School has been a home to immigrant and refugee students. In 2017, during the worst global refugee crisis in history, its immigrant population numbered close to three hundred—or nearly half the school—and many were refugees new to the country. These young people came from thirty-five different countries, speaking more than thirty-eight different languages.
In Refugee High, award-winning author Elly Fishman offers a riveting chronicle of the 2017–18 school year at Sullivan High, a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric was at its height in the White House. Even as we follow teachers and administrators grappling with the everyday challenges facing many urban schools, we witness the complicated circumstances and unique needs of refugee and immigrant children. Heartbreaking and inspiring in equal measure, Refugee High raises vital questions about the priorities and values of a public school and offers an eye-opening and captivating window into the present-day American immigration and education systems.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Fishman debuts with an intimate and moving chronicle of the 2017–2018 school year at Sullivan High School in Chicago, where nearly half the student body was born in another country. Fishman explains that principal Chad Adams, who arrived in 2013, set out to turn the struggling school around by increasing funding for the English language learner program. Deeply personal interviews reveal how Sullivan students—ID'd by first names only—struggle with unstable home lives and anxieties over their immigration status. Sixteen-year-old Shahina, a Burmese refugee, escapes an arranged marriage but has to help pay back the $2,000 her mother was given as an engagement gift; meanwhile, Alejandro, a senior, fears that he'll lose his asylum hearing and be sent back to Guatemala, where 10 of his friends have recently been killed in gang violence. Sullivan staff members provide emotional support in addition to English language instruction, and try to assuage worries caused by President Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. Fishman unearths the inner lives of her subjects with care and precision, and skillfully balances lighter moments (soccer games, TikTok dances) with harrowing turns of events. The result is a powerful portrait of resilience in the face of long odds.
