Giving Compass' Take:

• Beth Hawkins, writing for The 74, reports on the turnaround efforts of Dugsi Academy, a school for many Somali refugees, located in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

• What is the role of donors in helping drive progress with school turnarounds? 

• Read about these innovations in education for refugee populations. 

What do you do with a school that is beloved by its families but is failing them academically? That is the heart of a community but isn’t teaching its children to read well enough to go to college, get jobs and give back?

Dugsi Academy, located in St. Paul, is one such school. The families of its 300 elementary and middle school students are all refugees displaced by the decades-long war in their native Somalia. When they first enroll, many have never been to a school or had a formal lesson.

Academically, however, 11 years after it opened in 2005, Dugsi Academy was one of the lowest-performing schools in the state. In 2016, just 7 percent of students passed state reading tests and fewer than 6 percent passed math. Still, abysmal as those numbers were, they didn’t mean much to Dugsi’s families, many of whom didn’t understand that children this far behind wouldn’t succeed in high school and beyond.

As a public charter school, Dugsi is accountable to its authorizer, which grants it permission to operate and is responsible for ensuring that it meets performance goals. After the 2016 test scores came in, the school’s nonprofit authorizer, Pillsbury United Communities, staged an intervention.

The school had 12 months to turn itself around, or Pillsbury would revoke its permission to operate. And there was one condition: Dugsi’s board of directors had to accept outside help.

Enter Mary Stafford. The ranks of those who specialize in top-to-bottom school overhauls are thin, and common wisdom is that in order for the reboots to succeed, all or most of a school’s leaders and staff must be replaced. But Stafford, a school turnaround veteran, had come to believe that starting over with a new set of educators drives families away.

Read the full article about refugee school turnaround by Beth Hawkins at The 74