Refugee haven ‘insulted’ by suit over alternative schooling
LANCASTER, Pa. — The handiwork posted outside a small classroom in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country hints at the ambition of the refugees studying at Phoenix Academy.
I come from Africa and want to be an economist. I come from Tanzania and want to be a teacher. I come from Cuba and want to be an architect. Their favourite subjects are math, English and science.
Yet how to help these 17- to 21-year-old high schoolers pursue the American dream — even as the country debates broader immigration issues — is a question dividing advocates in several federal lawsuits.
The Lancaster community, steeped in centuries of religious tolerance, runs an “international school” on its main high school campus to help the waves of new arrivals sponsored by local resettlement agencies learn English and adjust to American schools. But the practice of sending the ones who are over 16 and have no school records to Phoenix, an alternative school in a former YMCA across town, has rattled critics who see it as a diploma mill.