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Rayan Mohamed, a Henninger High School senior, scrambled to get her college applications prepared in October. The senior, who immigrated to the United States seven years ago, said she assumed the college application process would take a day or two but quickly learned that was not the case.

“I thought it was like an easy process,” Mohamed said. “But then I found out how difficult it was when I was under pressure trying to finish (the applications) on top of schoolwork and all of my classes.”

The senior said if Syracuse City School District had cultural advocates to work with high schoolers who are new Americans and their families, she would have known to begin preparing the summer before senior year.

The North Side Learning Center is where a group of about 10 Syracuse high school students, including Mohamed, meet on Thursday evenings to work on public speaking skills. Since the group started in August, they have identified issues that students who are immigrants in the Syracuse City School District face and have developed speeches to present to the school board.

Mohamed, a co-leader of the NSLC speech team, said she and the two other students — Nottingham High School senior Yasmine Kanaan and Henninger junior Ladan Farah — have given speeches on hiring faculty advocates for immigrant students, focusing more attention on students’ mental health, and giving all SCSD students time off for the Islamic holiday Eid al-Fitr.

In Mohamed’s speech to the SCSD board members at April’s board business meeting, she requested that the school district hire a faculty advocate for each city school with African students. The senior added that students need an advocate to convey certain aspects of school life to their parents and keep students who are immigrants informed about college opportunities.

“Because there’s a lot of things that’s unspoken around the schools, and it’s something that we cannot speak (about). So we want someone who can speak for us,” Mohamed said.

While the school district has hired “nationality workers” who are meant to help refugee and immigrant students navigate school, Brice Nordquist, who has worked with NSLC for about eight years, believes that the program has not lived up to expectations.

Nordquist, the dean’s professor of community engagement in the writing studies, rhetoric and composition department at Syracuse University, works with the team’s coach, Andy Ridgeway. He said the school district still needs employees in all of its schools who work closely with refugee students and are culturally aware of their needs.

“What the folks on the debate team are hoping for is people with a deep kind of cultural knowledge,” Nordquist said. “This advocate is not just to help support education, learning or families’ access to schools, but also to advocate for things like … Ramadan and prayer spaces.”

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Farah spoke to the board about instituting more measures to track students’ mental health, which she said could come in the form of more faculty advocates who are knowledgeable of Muslim students’ cultural background.

Farah, Mohamed and Kanaan have been attending the meetings since January, Kanaan said. Farah believes that if they continue to return every month and speak during the session, the board will listen and accept their requests.

Mohamed added that the school board doesn’t make changes very quickly, so the speech team has time to rework their speeches before each meeting they attend.

While the three students have attended board meetings since January, they have only spoken at two of them so far, Kanaan said. The Nottingham senior is advocating for SCSD to recognize Eid al-Fitr — which marks the end of Ramadan — and give all students in the school district the day off.

Over the last decade, nearly 7,500 refugees have arrived in Syracuse, and many have come from majority-Muslim countries like Somalia, Syria and Iraq. Despite the prevalent Muslim community that Kanaan has seen grow in Syracuse, she is confused why SCSD has not recognized Eid al-Fitr while neighboring Jamesville-DeWitt Central School District already decided to last year.

“We have a neighboring suburban school, Jamesville-DeWitt, they have Eid off,” Kanaan said. “But, such diverse schools like SCSD have massively large populations of refugees and Muslims. Why do we not have it off?”

Nordquist agreed with Kanaan’s sentiment that the SCSD needs to do a better job of acknowledging the largely growing Muslim community in Syracuse.

“There is a need for more kinds of acknowledgement of the large number of students in SCSD who are Muslim and also the cultural practices around that,” he said.

Not having the holiday off puts Muslim students in a tough position when the holiday conflicts with exams, Kanaan said. This year, Eid al-Fitr falls days after the national Advanced Placement exams, so while she would like to begin celebrating early, she will have to get through her exams first.

Even though Kanaan said she had teachers who were unaware of the significance of Eid al-Fitr when she entered high school four years ago, many of them have learned about Muslim traditions and help her work around assignments she misses for holidays.

While the members of the speech team have not heard whether their requests will be approved yet, they will continue to attend the meetings through the rest of the school year in hopes that future generations of students will benefit from their advocacy.

“I have hope that one day we could possibly make changes, and be the voice of these kids,” Mohamed said.

Published on April 25, 2022 at 10:33 pm

Contact Louis: louis@dailyorange.com | @JBL__98