Building on popular high school classes, St. Paul school district launches two Karen kindergartens

Dah Bu gathered her kindergartners on the rainbow carpet and asked them to identify the letter she held in her hand.

“K!” chorused her students.

K is the first letter in Karen, she told her students, writing the word on the board. And it’s also the first letter of kindergarten.

For two kindergarten classes at Wellstone Elementary School, it was the first day not only of school but also for a new program in the St. Paul Public Schools: an elementary program in Karen language and culture.

For now the elementary program is just for kindergarten, but the district plans to expand it to other grade levels in the future. The program, taught by Karen teachers, will be primarily in English with Karen language and culture instruction several days per week.

The new kindergarten program comes after the St. Paul district introduced Karen classes in high schools last fall. School officials believe the courses are the first Karen language instruction offered at any public school district in the United States — a major step for a refugee community that had been largely denied the opportunity to learn its native language in schools since a 1962 Burmese military coup.

The new regime banished the Karen language from public schools in the country now called Myanmar. Since that time, many Karen people have learned their language at church or in refugee camps.

The rollout of high school Karen classes last fall in St. Paul was “successful beyond our wildest dreams,” said Sarah Schmidt de Carranza, the district’s executive director of multilingual learning. District officials had hoped 150 kids might sign up; more than 300 did.

And right away, parents started asking for elementary programs as well.

“The immediate follow-up question from the community, once we started the high school courses, is, ‘Well, when can they start sooner?’” said Megan Budke, the district’s immersion, Indigenous and world language coordinator. Students have better academic outcomes when they are able to study languages throughout their K-12 career, she said.

Karen is the fifth-most common home language of Minnesota students, after English, Spanish, Somali and Hmong, according to state data. About half the state’s 5,000 Karen students attend St. Paul Public Schools. But in recent years, Karen enrollment in the district has seen a slight decline, while the share of Karen students attending metro charter schools has been on the rise.

Jackie Turner, the St. Paul district’s executive administration and operations chief, said that while an increasing number of Karen students are leaving the district, they are not finding Karen language, cultural programs or staff in other schools.

“There was a market that wasn’t being served,” she said.

Turner sees the expansion of Karen offerings as an opportunity to lure families back to the district. Wellstone Elementary has enrolled 57 new students as a result of the Karen kindergarten, including 30 kindergartners and 27 older siblings. About 80% of the older students were not enrolled in St. Paul Public Schools last year, Turner said.

Hsakushee Zan, now a school counselor at Wellstone — which she described as a “dream job” — helped lead the advocacy efforts for the district’s Karen program. Her son enrolled in the high-school level class last fall, but struggled to master the language’s tones. Over the course of the year, she noticed he started to ask her more questions about how to communicate in Karen, and asked for a Karen flag. This year, he will retake the class so he can develop a strong foundation in the language.

“My goal as a parent is to preserve language and my culture,” she said. “I want my kid to keep language alive. So seeing my son changing, loving his language and culture — I’m happy to see that. I believe he will continue, not only his generation but future generations.”

Next year, Hsakushee Zan plans to enroll her pre-kindergarten daughter in Wellstone’s elementary Karen program. She hopes her younger children will have the opportunity to learn about their culture and language throughout their K-12 education.

“If my kid takes a Karen class at an early age, they will value the language,” she said.

Htoo Ku Wah, a Karen language specialist at Wellstone, started the first day of kindergarten in Dah Bu’s classroom. She has been developing a curriculum to teach the kids to read and write in Karen. But first, she’ll start teaching basic greetings: how to say good morning and good afternoon.

“They’ve heard it, but they might not be able to say it well,” she said. “That’s why they’re here.”

She felt anxious about her responsibility to create the curriculum from scratch, she said. But she also felt excitement — and so did parents, she said.

“They’re so excited because it’s very historical that it’s the first time that we are able to teach our language in public school,” she said. “That has never happened before.”

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This story comes to you from Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. Sign up for a free newsletter to receive Sahan’s stories in your inbox.