New faces, new cell phone policies — and for some Minneapolis students, a welcome to a new country

New teachers, new class schedules, and newly sharpened pencils are hallmarks of the first day of school.

But for some Minneapolis Public Schools students and teachers, the beginning of this school year marked even bigger changes. For some students at Andersen United Middle School, it was the first day in a new country’s education system.

As students and parents arrived at Andersen on Tuesday morning, one mother spoke with Annie Connor, an English language teacher focused on supporting multilingual newcomers. The family hadn’t finished registering their children for school, the mother explained in Spanish. Connor asked if they had a passport or another form of identification, and directed them to the main office.

At Andersen, about 300 of the school’s 1,000 students have arrived in the country in the last three years, said Connor, who teaches a special class to help orient students who are new to the United States. Some of the Spanish-speaking students enroll in Andersen’s dual-language program. Another offering for Spanish-speaking students: a Spanish debate program, which allows students an opportunity to excel academically in their native language.

Johan Quiquintaña, 13, said he hoped he’d do well in his classes this year and make friends. He also looked forward to returning to the Spanish-language debate program.

Johan, now starting eighth grade, came to the United States from Ecuador three years ago. Last year in debate, he read extensively about Cuba to debate the United States’ embargo. He won a coach’s award for his efforts.

“Debate is an experience that helps you improve your day-to-day life and improve yourself as a person,” he said in Spanish.

For other Andersen students, the biggest change will be the new cell phone policy. Students will have to store their phones in pouches that only teachers can unlock during the day — a policy some students said they supported.

“It’s better because I don’t get distracted by it,” said 13-year-old Yuriria Danae Becerra Alvarez.

For sixth-graders, the biggest change was adjusting to switching classrooms every hour. Liz Dwight, who teaches sixth-grade social studies in Spanish, instructed her new students to look at their schedules to find out where their next classes would be. But, she cautioned them, the schedules might change.

“As if it isn’t enough that you’ve come to a big new school where it’s difficult to find the classrooms, the schedules keep changing too,” she said in Spanish.

This class had 27 students, while other classes had as many as 40, she said, so changes were likely in the first week.

The students, looking at their schedules, stayed quiet, their voices barely above a whisper. To raise the energy level, Dwight passed out red plastic cups to pods of desks and introduced a game called “Vaso,” or cup. She gave them instructions in Spanish: touch your shoulders; dance merengue; Vaso.

At “Vaso,” the students grabbed for the red cup, trying to be the first at their table to get it. Instead of whispers, the room filled with sixth-grade laughter.

A hectic start but fully staffed

At Bethune Arts Elementary School in north Minneapolis, it was the first day of school not just for students and teachers, but also for Principal La Tonya Overton. Overton joined Minneapolis Public Schools this summer after working as an associate principal in the Mounds View Public Schools.

In a word, the morning was “hectic,” she said. She was still meeting staff and students, and finding her way around the building.

But the school was fully staffed, she said, “as of 12:42 Sunday morning.” The last positions to fill had been a long-term substitute position and a special education role. The school had also seen a lot of staff turnover from last year, she said.

Despite the new principal and new teachers, some activities remained the same. In Lauren Fugh’s fourth-grade classroom, students sketched their hands in various shades of brown, tan, and peach after reading the book “Skin Like Mine.” Fugh reminded her students they had seen last year’s fourth-graders’ drawings from this activity in the hallway the year before. They brainstormed different words to describe their skin. Several students wrote that their skin was caramel-colored; another compared his skin to an Oreo. One Spanish-speaking girl, who added detailed lines to the sketch of her hand, said her skin was the color of a flower.

Down the hall, fifth-grader Armani Rathbun played a math game with his classmate Renaldo Sept. Armani said he was glad to see many familiar faces.

“When I came in, I was kind of nervous because I thought it was going to be new people,” he said of the first day of school. “But now I’m seeing it’s old people, and I know a lot about them.”

Armani said he hoped “to learn new education and multiplication” in fifth grade — and enjoy his final year in elementary school. “It’s my last year, so I want to at least have some fun.”

In a neighboring fourth- and fifth-grade classroom, Kadence Barnett, who just turned 9, inspected the books in her classroom library. She had already read the first book in the “Secret Coders” series, and her teacher had a set of all six.

What was she looking forward to about fourth grade?

“I’m looking forward to lunch,” Kadence said. “I get very hungry.”

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