High percentage of students are English learners. Most students are from Nepal, Somalia, Bhutan, Congo, etc. Winooski is Vermont’s largest refugee community per capita.

Winooski is a community with a large refugee population and a lot of first generation Americans. This presents lots of unique challenges especially in Vermont. There are kids whose native language isn’t spoken by anyone in New England - much less Vermont. It makes meeting any proficiencies a challenge when the communication and cultural divide is so great.

You can always move there and choose to use school choice to go somewhere else. One of my best friends in high school was from winooski but went to a neighboring Chittenden county HS through the program

There is nothing wrong with Winooski schools. Look at the demographics. It's the most diverse town in the State has a high number of ESL students. The "best" schools are typically the wealthiest and whitest.

Well first thing you gotta do is source your data. Though I don't think it'd be pleasant going to school there with the F-35s. There's also a large refugee population in Winooski so you've got to expect a good portion of students to not have gotten much of a chance at education, or maybe even learning English fluently, before arriving in the US.

you think there's nothing wrong with terrible graduation rates and 20% proficiency rates?

Thank you. This makes sense.

Their attitude towards it is the same with out local school and why we’re moving. I sympathize with the cause, but refuse to excuse the symptoms.

Winooski is the Lewiston of Vermont

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A lot of the kids arrive here when they are already in high school and have to start learning English then and can't possibly meet what we consider standard English requirements for graduating seniors. It is a huge downfall of a dumb system like standardized testing to group these kids in with people who have spoken English since they were toddlers.

I think it's rather short sighted to 1. ignore that many of the families there are living in poverty and many students leave school to get jobs and help support the family. So...yea, that's going to affect the graduation rate and 2. ignore that standardized tests suck...add in the ESL aspect and 20% isn't really a big deal.

My district is 48%. Our ESL pop is very low. Sure, 48% may be more than double 20% but it's still abysmal when you know it means there's 52% here that aren't proficient.

A VERY small taste of what other states a dealing with..

It's also a population that wants no part of integrating into American society (assuming you are talking about Somalis). All the other immigrant groups, including those from other African countries seem at least somewhat interested in being good neighbors and getting along. The Somalis, not so much.

Winooski school staff are actually excellent, Essex westford is also fantastic! As others have pointed out, the heavy numbers of new Americans skew the winooski stats but both areas have extremely good schools.

I was not talking about any group in particular at all... There are loads of people from all over the world who live in that area and for many of them english isn't a first language...