The new students at St. George Academy in Manhattan’s Little Ukraine neighborhood say they are relieved to be attending classes where they can speak their native language and relate to peers — but adjusting to life in New York City has not been easy.

“I saw the looks on these kids’ faces as we did tours of the school,” said St. George Academy principal Andrew Stasiw. “And we would walk by classrooms and they see people who sound like them and speak Ukrainian … there was a sense of comfort and relief.”

But there’s a new and different life off of St. George’s campus that lacks the schools’ reminders of home. 

Gone is the pageantry of hearing people in the U.S. sing their national anthem and parade in solidarity as their country was bombed by Russia. Now they are navigating life in a city that feels unfamiliar.

As St. George Academy bought new lockers and textbooks for the Ukrainian students — many of whom are attending on full scholarships — the refugees have returned home to living situations that aren’t ideal: Some are without their parents who had to stay back and fight; others are living in shelters or in small, maxed out apartments.

And Stasiw has new worries — money. Now that enrollment has grown from 80 students to 140 — currently including 33 refugee students — he’s unsure how he can support them.

“When the war first broke out, our efforts here were to raise money for Ukraine,” Stasiw said. “Now we need to raise money for our Ukrainian students that are here.”

Welcoming dozens of new students put pressure on the small staff and building — so Stasiw got to work reshaping its landscape.

“I had to hire additional teachers. I had to get additional lockers. I had to buy a lot more textbooks,” Stasiw said. 

Meanwhile, the newcomers’ lives in New York City are far from what they expected.

They know New York City from the movies, Stasiw said, “where it’s so beautiful and they just see Central Park, [the students] comment on how amazed they are by all the rats and violence … They suddenly don’t feel like they’re safe.”

One student currently lives in a homeless shelter with her mother, who often doesn’t have money for food and frequents the school’s small cafeteria for lunch. 

Another student has been falling asleep in class most days. She’s sharing a small room with several people and an infant who keeps her up at night.

The new lockers St. George Academy scraped limited funds to buy are full of students’ belongings and several days worth of clothes because there is no storage space in their current dwellings.

Even though resources are stretched, Stasiw said he can’t turn away the Ukrainian students who have seen things that would be unimaginable to their peers. 

One student, Stasiw said, “saw her city destroyed by missiles. She’s in shock.”

That student is now living in a homeless shelter that initially enrolled her in a public school. “She goes there … and she doesn’t speak any English … and she gets bullied by three girls,” Stasiw said.

Her mother came pleading to Stasiw to let her into St. George Academy, a high school, even though she’s only in eighth grade. 

“We were able to offer her a uniform but she couldn’t afford shoes. So I gave her $100 right before Christmas,” Stasiw explained. But when she came back from their winter break, she returned the money to him. “She says, ‘some people we met gave us a free pair. They fit fine. Here’s the $100 back.’ ”

One Ukrainian parent asked if their daughter could live in the principal’s one bedroom apartment, because Stasiw lives nearby the school.

“They’re struggling,” Stasiw said about his new students, “but they’re not looking for a free ride.”

Even with the school expanding and changing, Stasiw remains focused on the challenging college-prep curriculum. Their 12th-grade classes have always been the smallest, he said, because “not everyone makes it to the finish line.”

“We’re not an easy school … We offer a lot of electives that they have to take. They’re going to take four years of computer coding. They’re going to take four years of music, they’re going to take astronomy, philosophy, psychology, sociology … Freshmen take two languages their first year … We’re still driving the curriculum.”

Behind the doors of the Academy are reminders of home … Not only is Ukrainian widely spoken but yellow and blue flags adorn most classrooms. For lunch, Stasiw will often treat his students to meals catered by neighborhood Ukrainian delis.

But once the school day is over, the students are back out in the city they find so unfamiliar — and much different from the quiet countryside many came from in Ukraine. 

“I feel like New York is just scarier. There’s a lot of stuff going on in New York every day,” said ninth-grader Olha Stanko, whose mother doesn’t let her hang out with friends as late as she once did in Ukraine. 

“It’s not as wonderful as I thought it was going to be, I thought it was going to be all high beautiful buildings and lots of parks,” said ninth-grader Nazariy Lanyk.

In addition to the culture shock, Stanko said she spends more time than the average teenager worrying about her father who can’t leave Ukraine because he’s under 65. 

“I have my dad in Ukraine, which is pretty hard for me because I haven’t seen him in a really long time,” she said. “That’s the thing that’s hardest for me the most. Ukraine’s my home and I want to go back there. That’s one thing a normal teenager doesn’t have to go through.”

Stanko was able to find comfort in reuniting with her best friend — Nicole Kozmey, who is now a 10th-grader at St. George Academy — a world away from the war in their home country.

They’re not sure where they’ll be in the next few years — if they’ll graduate from St. George Academy or return home to Ukraine. But for now St. George Academy is hoping to keep being the place where they can focus on their education in the comfort of a Ukrainian community. 

“Research will tell you that if students are afraid, not comfortable, they won’t learn,” Stasiw said. “So … that sense of warmth that they get from our teachers and from everybody in our small environment … I think that’s made all the difference in the world.”

Chris Riback: Sarah, thank you for coming to the ELN studio.

Sarah Smith: Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Chris Riback: The International Rescue Committee is an iconic centerpiece of global culture. What are you doing at a conference for early childhood development?

Sarah Smith: Well, I’m the head of education for the International Rescue Committee and I oversee IRC’s programs in 40 countries and 20 US cities that are serving children around the world. I’m here to learn from the amazing expertise and all of the researchers and students, everyone here-

Chris Riback: There’s a lot.

Sarah Smith: … and take it in and really try to apply it then to our programs.

Chris Riback: So let’s talk about your programs. What is the mission and what is the vision around education for IRC?

Sarah Smith: We focus primarily on refugees and displaced people living in conflicting crisis settings. We were founded in 1933 by Albert Einstein. At that time, our mission was primarily to help refugees in Europe seek safety throughout Europe and in the United States. Because many of the people who founded the IRC were academics themselves, education was central to everything we did from the moment we were founded.

Sarah Smith: Obviously the world has changed. There are a lot of similarities to that time, but primarily our vision to provide access to learning opportunities for children of all ages, from birth through adulthood. Most of our education programs are in the primary school range but we are doing a lot more early childhood development to improve those developmental and learning outcomes that we know are so important.

Chris Riback: So give me some examples of what are the tactics or programs or capabilities that help bring to them. A refugee in a camp someplace, what’s a tactical, practical thing that you do?

Sarah Smith: One of the more common things we’ll do and easy to envision is that we set up preschools or early learning centers. They look very different depending on the country. We help establish those centers. We hire facilitators. Sometimes they’re trained teachers. Sometimes they’re just community members. We provide them with support and training and then we go out in the community, talk to parents, and bring children into those centers.

Sarah Smith: But one of the things that’s I think most exciting about some of our early childhood work is how we leverage the other sectors and integrate early childhood into every sector, program that exists. So there will likely be a health facility, a community health clinic or community health workers that are meeting with families in a community. Oftentimes, they don’t have the training or information about what young children need. So we’ll equip them with understanding about young children. We’ll give them resources to use in their clinic or their home visits and we’ll blanket all of the social services with early childhood content.

Chris Riback: Interesting. So identify an existing distribution network-

Sarah Smith: Exactly.

Chris Riback: … and help them.

Sarah Smith: Yes.

Chris Riback: Is this statistic still accurate? Over 62 million children in countries affected by war remain out of school.

Sarah Smith: It is, for refugee children specifically, which is a smaller number of the overall population of displaced. It’s more than half of all refugee children have no access to any form of education. In early childhood, it’s far, far higher. The kids who have any access to early learning or the kind of care that we know will promote their development is tiny. It’s a sliver of the population.

Chris Riback: You can only imagine as migration and environment and other changes occur and force movement among people, that’s a humanitarian crisis.

Sarah Smith: It is. It is. It’s in many ways the biggest opportunity as well, because I think the system itself hasn’t been set up to serve these children and to provide these kinds of programs. 5, 10 years down the road, we know what’s going to happen to these children if they don’t get the support that they need.

Chris Riback:Well, you can’t do what you do for a living if you don’t see something like that as an opportunity and not a challenge. You’ve got to have that view.

To close out, the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition and the bringing of Sesame Street to Syria, tell me about that whole event.

Sarah Smith: It’s been really fun and remarkable working with Sesame Workshop. We’ve been testing our approaches in the Syria region, in Jordan and Lebanon, before MacArthur was launched. It’s going to be the largest scale early childhood program in a humanitarian setting. We’re hoping to reach a million and a half kids with the direct services of home visiting and center-based services.

There will also be a new Sesame Street for the Middle East with new Muppets who’ve just been created, and we are bringing not just the great Sesame characters and stories, but early learning and lessons about how to nurture and support the development of children into health facilities, into women’s centers, into even cash points where families go to get a stipend to help them stay afloat.

So if we can show that it is possible to integrate early childhood development into every service in the humanitarian sector, that will change the entire sector. It has really catalyzed others to pay attention to this population and to realize that there are solutions out there.

I have the good fortune of seeing people running programs in these very challenging circumstances and succeeding. And so, it’s easy for me to be an optimist.

Chris Riback: That’s terrific. Thank you for the work and thank you for stopping by the studio.

Sarah Smith: Thank you.