In the summer of 2004, Fatuma Muhina flew across the ocean from Kenya and landed in Pittsburgh. Her family had been uprooted by Somalia’s civil war and resettled in the United States.
She arrived in Pittsburgh with no formal education and not a word of English, yet was thrown into the city’s public school system and had to navigate the challenges that came with it.
“Of course, it was very hard being thrown out to a country that you don’t speak no English whatsoever,” she said. “So from there forward, I took school very serious.”
She enrolled in Pittsburgh Public Schools [PPS] as a seventh-grader. By the time she was approaching graduation, PPS, citing asbestos issues, decided to close Schenley High School, forcing her to change schools just as she was starting to feel comfortable.
Two decades later, Muhina, 34, has settled in North Side’s Perry South neighborhood with her husband and nine children. She’s also president of the United Somali Bantu of Greater Pittsburgh.
But as she works to guide her kids through school, she finds herself facing many of the same frustrations she encountered with PPS years ago: a lack of communication, bullying and persistent safety concerns. Now, as the district prepares another major overhaul that could shutter 12 schools, she worries history is repeating itself.
Translation for dialects is scarce
Born in the midst of Somalia’s civil war, Muhina’s family was displaced to a refugee camp in Kenya in 1996, when she was five years old. During the first years of her life, Muhina lacked any formal schooling. School wasn’t mandatory and classrooms run by volunteers were inconsistent, she said. Moreover, most families discouraged educating girls.
It wasn’t until the fall of 2004 that Muhina got an opportunity to study in a school classroom. Muhina’s family was among roughly 12,000 Somalian Bantu families living in Kenyan refugee camps who immigrated to the United States.
Muhina enrolled in seventh grade at PPS Frick Middle School, now home to Sci-Tech 6-12.
“I was excited that I got to have the same opportunity as a boy would. The only limitation I’ll have is on me,” she said. “And I was glad that it was a mandatory thing, so my parents have no choice but to send me to school.”
However, the excitement of going to school quickly gave way to challenges.
As a first-generation student in America, Muhina had to navigate a public school system that she and her parents struggled to understand. She received tutoring and joined the English Language Development [ELD] program, but the district was unprepared for the sudden arrival of Somali Bantu refugee students.
The school provided a Swahili interpreter, but many Somali Bantu students, like Muhina, did not speak Swahili. Muhina spoke Kizigua, a dialect only related to Swahili. Many other students spoke Maay Maay, another dialect that is vastly different from Swahili.
“Other kids did speak Swahili. The boys did, but the girls didn’t, because when we were back in camp, boys were allowed to go wherever they wanted and experience that and learn new languages. As females, we were kept in the house, so we did not get that exposure,” Muhina said.
Jonathan Covel, the ELD director at PPS, said the district has since hired two interpreters who speak Kizigua and Maay Maay based on community feedback. But communication in certain dialects remains a challenge as many multinational translation companies do not provide services in all regional dialects, he added.
‘Tickets after tickets’
Today, Muhina finds herself reliving some of those same struggles through her own children’s education.
Her eldest, Hamadi, is a junior at PPS Perry High School. When he was younger, Muhina enrolled him at King PreK-8 for first and second grade but there were frequent reports of fights breaking out on the buses. She then enrolled him at Miller PreK-5 in the Hill District, where another obstacle emerged: Hamadi had ADHD that the district failed to identify. Without support, he had to repeat a grade.
“That’s very common within the United Somali Bantu,” Muhina said. “Instead of providing them the proper education tools and directing them into the right direction, [it is] easier to make the kid repeat a grade.”
Frustrated, Muhina pulled Hamadi from Miller and enrolled him at Propel Northside, a charter school, during fifth grade for the rest of his middle school years. She hoped to send him to Propel Montour High School but ultimately enrolled him at Perry because it was closer.
Most of her other children, between first to eighth grades, attend Propel North Side. Muhina said Propel’s communication and enrollment procedures were much simpler. Above all, she wanted to spare them from the kind of bullying she endured in PPS.
“I didn’t want my kids to feel like they don’t belong, because that’s what I felt,” she said.
Muhina would, though, rather enroll her children in PPS because of its gifted and magnet programs. Her daughter, Leyla, a first grader, was identified as gifted. Muhina hoped to enroll her in PPS Montessori PreK-5 because Propel does not have a gifted program. Faced with PPS’s complex magnet school enrollment system, Muhina called the district for help, but didn’t get the support she needed and did not apply for the school lottery.
“Although I would like Pittsburgh to make things easier for families to enroll, they did not make it easy,” she said. “Especially when you call the helpline, you just keep submitting tickets after tickets. At some point, I just got sick of submitting tickets.”
Pugh said 11 of the 12 tickets Muhina filed were marked “‘closed’, indicating the inquiry was resolved,” and added that she cannot confirm Muhina’s claims about the district’s lack of support because there is no way to trace the phone calls.
PPS offers both online and in-person enrollment options for English Language Learners families like Muhina’s, whose kids are in ELL programs. The district also sends out translated documents to families before the magnet lottery opens to make them aware of the timelines.
“Our number one goal is to get kids into school as quickly as we can,” said Covel. “So we want to remove any barriers or obstacles that are there.”
Hearing echoes of Schenley’s closing
Upon finishing middle school from Frick 6-8, Muhina enrolled at Schenley High School, which came with new challenges. At that time, Muhina’s family lived in Lawrenceville and she had to use the county’s bus system to reach her school. The district provided bus passes, but for Muhina, lacking fluency in English made the commute daunting.
During Muhina’s time at school, many immigrant students were bullied, and fights broke out frequently. Muhina said her teachers were not equipped to de-escalate those conflicts and the language barrier made her feel unheard.
Learning subjects outside ELL classes was another challenge. Muhina said teachers lacked additional training to teach English language learners along with other general education students.
“I felt embarrassed to ask questions sometimes, because I felt like I was gonna be judged by the English-speaking people.”
Covel said PPS now provides multiple training opportunities for ELL teachers and paraprofessionals at school and district-wide levels throughout the year.
Right before her senior year at Schenley High, PPS announced it would close the school building, and Muhina, along with other ELL students, was reassigned to Allderdice 9-12 to finish her final year.
Despite the challenges at Schenley, Muhina had grown to like the school and was disappointed to see it close. She had made friends and was participating in a computer education program offered by Carnegie Mellon University. After school on Friday, she frequented a nearby mosque. Moving to Allderdice meant losing both opportunities.
Now, for Muhina, the new plan brings back memories of the past. She said, like the previous round of closures, she feels the district has not been listening to and taking meaningful input from parents.
“I feel like it’s been a decision made already,” she said. “Back then, we did protesting. We talked to everybody — media, we talked to the board members, the parents. Nothing made any difference.”
Today, Muhina has reservations about the sweeping Facilities Utilization Plan. Many of the Somali Bantu families send their children to King PreK-8, which would be closed under the proposed plan. Elementary magnet programs except Montessori would be eliminated. Middle school and high school magnets, except CAPA, would be converted into neighborhood magnet programs.
“I feel like parents’ choices are being taken away … and eventually the magnet program is gonna close down, and everybody’s gonna be pushed to their home school, which some parents are not okay with that,” she said.
Leading the community in Northview Heights
Years of navigating education in the city pushed Muhina to do more than just advocate for her own children. She wanted to help other Somali Bantu families avoid the struggles she had endured.
In 2019, Muhina decided to quit her accounting job to pursue her passion. She joined the Holy Family Institute as a service coordinator and the United Somali Bantu of Greater Pittsburgh as a community advocate, where she became president this year. The organization strives to help families facing food insecurity, language barriers and housing insecurity and provide them with resources.
“The main goal was to have a one-stop shop,” she said. “One place you could get your problems solved, from housing to diapers.”
She also started advocating for parents who were facing difficulties in PPS. She said ELL families would benefit from a central office, somewhere to walk in, ask questions, and get help with paperwork or enrollment, instead of relying on phone calls and delayed interpretation.
The organization operates from Northview Heights, a predominantly Black neighborhood and home to many African immigrant and refugee communities with a sizable Somali Bantu population. Muhina lived in Northview Heights for a couple of years before moving to Homewood and eventually settling in nearby Perry South.
Now, the district’s Facilities Utilization Plan is proposing to reopen Northview Heights PreK-8 as an elementary school. The building has sat vacant since the district closed it in 2012, citing low enrollment, and has since been used as a preschool.
In an email statement, district spokesperson Ebony Pugh said Northview Heights was chosen among other buildings to reopen as part of the district’s goal to create community hubs and ensure that services are available closer to home for students. She added that the current separation by sending students to King, in Allegheny Center, and Arsenal, in Lawrenceville, disrupts natural feeder patterns, lengthens bus rides and limits engagement opportunities for families.
Muhina said she is worried that reopening Northview Heights would deepen segregation in the predominantly Black neighborhood. The community has also seen recurring issues of violence and conflict between the immigrant African communities and the African American community.
Bill Gandy, founder of the Allegheny City Historic Gallery, said since the influx of African refugees in Northview Heights, the two communities have struggled to integrate and have been in conflict.
“I assume Housing Authority put them up there because they assume that they’re Black, and the people living up there were Black, so that would work,” he said. “Those are whole different cultures.”
But, he added, reopening the school would expose students to each other’s cultures and reduce some of the tensions in the community.
The conflict was present even when she attended Frick Middle and Schenley High School.
“These two groups, we hated each other,” she said. “There was no love, no compassion, no compromising, nothing.”
“I didn’t know I was Black-Black until I came to this country. Now I’m reminded every day I’m Black,” she said.
Muhina said putting all the students in one school would lead to more fights in the community.
Under the proposed plan, students from Northview Heights, Spring Hill City View, Perry North, Spring Garden, Troy Hill and Summerhill would attend the elementary school.
Before opening the school, Muhina said, the district needs to guarantee safety, proper funding and equal resources for all students in the neighborhood. She added that PPS should have inclusive cultural education and training for teachers to reduce conflicts.
Pugh said the plan to reopen the school building would not move forward without a safety plan in place.
Muhina’s son, Abdulhakim, 3, goes to Northview Heights Early Education Center. She likes that school because of its proximity to her workplace. But if the district decides to reopen the building as an elementary school, she would consider moving him out of the district because of her concerns about safety and bullying.
With so much uncertainty about future educational options, she’s trying to prepare her children to adapt to any situation in a multicultural district.
“I teach my kids every day: Don’t be that ignorant,” she said. “Learn, get to know people. Don’t judge them by looking at them or how they are dressed.”
Editor’s note (9/2): Information from PPS on the resolution of Muhina’s tickets was received and added to this story post-publication.
Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan.
