In the Bronx, ethnic mix breeds tensions at school
by Dexter Filkins
At lunchtime, the Albanian students at Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx gather in front of the diner across East Tremont Avenue. Other students, many of them black and Hispanic, head the other way, toward the White Castle.
"They all hate us," said Diana Gjoljaj, a 17-year-old Albanian who stood in front of the Tremont East diner as her friends pitched coins against the restaurant wall. "That's why we hang together."
It is an old story, the immigrants versus the neighborhood, only this one has a modern edge. The outsiders are Lehman's approximately 200 Albanian students, some of them refugees from the wars in the Balkans. The established crowd is black and Hispanic, the majority of Lehman's approximately 4,000 students.
But instead of the occasional schoolyard scuffle, tensions at Lehman escalated in December into a full-fledged brawl involving dozens of students outside the school's front gates, with the Albanians squaring off against everyone else. The police arrested 13 students, including several Albanians. More than 15 students were suspended.
For the Albanian students, the difficulties in trying to fit in at Lehman form a frustrating epilogue to the ethnic strife that many of them left behind. Many say that they are unfairly singled out because they are white in a school dominated by blacks and Hispanics, and they accuse administrators of being sympathetic to the majority.
"I don't want to go back to that school," said Shkelqim Bakraqi, a 14-year-old who was arrested and suspended after the brawl. "I don't want no trouble, but if someone is going to hit me, I'm not going to let him."
Shkelqim, who came to the United States from a refugee camp in Montenegro in 1999, is waiting, along with the others who were arrested, to see if he will be charged in family court. Despite glowing recommendations from administrators at the middle school that he had attended, Shkelqim has shunned the temporary school offered to him during his suspension and has stopped attending classes altogether.
Shkelqim's mother, Nazmije, said she understood. "I like America," she said. "If you find a job here, nobody going to make a problem for you. But we don't feel safe about letting my son go back. Maybe something going to happen again."
