Wyatt Obering is a reporter with Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.
It wasn’t long ago that Saja Almogalli lost her father, fled her home of Iraq after threats to her mother and was stopped from going to school as she waited in Turkey for a chance at resettlement.
Now Almogalli, a refugee who’s been in Vermont since 2017, has a job aimed at helping kids feel safe in school after all those years growing up in fear.
Late this fall she was selected as the district liaison officer for the Winooski School District, a role in which she hopes to ensure the safety of students K-12 in visits from the city police station, where she’s based.
Almogalli sees herself in the students she serves: Winooski is the only majority-minority school district in Vermont, and its students come from more than two dozen countries and speak almost as many languages. Many belong to refugee families.
“She’s got a tremendous amount of experience working within a very diverse community,” Winooski Police Chief Justin Huizenga said. “She brings a lot to the table.”
It has been a lengthy journey for Almogalli, a former school board member and police officer in Burlington, who left her home country with her family in 2014 after her father died.
She comes from a background of educators.
“My mom was an economics/math professor. My dad taught biology for a little,” Almogalli said. “Then, you know, they started having kids, and the war started. One had to stay at home. My mom was forced to quit her job.”
Her mother, she said, was facing threats as cultural shifts dictated an increasingly hostile attitude toward women in education. And going to school became less and less safe with violence in the country. “We weren’t safe to stay there,” Almogalli said.
Researchers, non-governmental organizations and United Nations officials have documented the disastrous impacts on kids’ education in the country, which has been consumed in conflicts for decades. Girls in particular have appeared to drop out during or after primary school at high rates.
With tensions brewing between their education-oriented family and the country they lived in, by 2014 it was time to leave. They fled to Turkey, a place they could be safe while figuring out where they could migrate in the long term.
But there, Almogalli said, she and her siblings found themselves in yet another struggle to access education.
“They made this rule where if you’re an immigrant, and you don’t have status to stay in the country, you can’t go to school,” she said.
Reports from a range of nonprofits and journalists suggest that in Turkey, people from certain countries, including Iraq, have faced complex legal and cultural barriers to education.
For the more than three years Almogalli and her family stayed in Turkey, they were not allowed to go to school, she said. She stayed at home and taught herself English while homeschooling her siblings.
The family was eventually told they might be able to resettle in one of three countries, Almogalli said: Australia, Canada or the U.S. That’s why she and her siblings drilled down on learning English. She would listen to English language music, watch English language movies and read English language books with her siblings.
Eventually, they resettled as refugees in the U.S. Burlington would be their new home.
“I immediately want to go back to school,” Almogalli recalls thinking upon arrival.
It had been roughly three and a half years since she last went.
She began at Burlington High School at age 16, knowing it was an unusual age to start high school. Despite her being a devoted student, she said language barriers as well as culture change made it no easy task to assimilate.
“I had to isolate myself from my family,” she said. “They speak Arabic all the time, and I was trying to learn English.”
Almogalli eventually found her footing, joining an after-school club to help other students with their English and translate their assignments.
She graduated in 2020 and, feeling she wasn’t ready to leave her family, applied to the University of Vermont.
She recalled the after-school workers who helped her become the first member of her family to attend college in America. She majored in biology up until her last semester, when she switched to studying health and society.
In 2022, when Almogalli was a junior in college, spots opened up on the Burlington School Board. She reflected on her family’s difficulties with education and felt inspired to run, according to the Vermont Cynic campus newspaper.
“I ran by myself, no one else ran against me,” she said. “I had just received my U.S. citizenship. It was too late for me to put my name on the ballot because I wasn’t a citizen yet. I was standing outside the library with a cutout of my name. I was telling people to write me in — ‘It’s me or no one’.”
She stood outside that polling place from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., she said, and the effort earned her a seat.
After college graduation, she took on another role in public service as a community service officer with the Burlington Police Department. Those are unarmed, unsworn officers who respond to quality-of-life calls.
Something must have clicked as she worked those shifts because soon she’d be enrolled in police academy and then hired as a full Burlington officer.
She saw the job opening for the Winooski schools position as a sign, she said, because it encompassed both of her post-grad roles.
“She reached out to us because she knew the school resource officer was retiring,” said Huizenga, the Winooski chief. “Shortly after meeting her, immediately after meeting and interacting with her, we felt that she was going to be a great fit, so we continued on with the process.”
District Superintendent Wilmer Chavvaria was equally complimentary: “Officer Saja is an impressive professional who demonstrated through the process that she understands the nuances of police presence among diverse communities, some of which have been systemically harmed and overpoliced,” said Chavvaria, who himself grew up in a refugee camp in Nicaragua.
He added, “She expressed her willingness and capacity to learn quickly and remain humble in the process while giving our families her all, just as she saw former role models do for her own family.”
She started around Thanksgiving. Almogalli’s responsibilities go beyond keeping Winooski students out of trouble. She said she needs to make sure students have the proper resources in their lives to succeed at school.
“I want everybody to have the same opportunity I had, or better,” she said.
While serving on the Burlington School Board, Almogalli said she had to focus on broad issues. As a school district officer, she believes she can be more directly there for students. She said it’s her responsibility to make sure things don’t escalate to a point where criminality is involved, and she thinks she can do so with the chance to get to know and guide students.
Last summer, when she was a Burlington police officer, she said she saw a lot of kids from Essex, Winooski and South Burlington come to the city on the weekends to fight, drink and cause trouble. She wants to steer kids clear of that in Winooski — if she can overcome the hurdle of distrust in law enforcement.
“From where I come from, and where other students come from, they don’t have a great relationship with police or authorities,” she said. “In my country, Iraq, police are corrupt. You don’t want to talk to them or look up to them. I know this for a lot of students who migrated to the U.S. They don’t really trust anyone with authority. That’s why I wanted to become a police officer in Burlington — there’s a lot of new Americans in Burlington. I just want to break that stigma. It’s okay to come and talk to me and ask me a question, or you don’t have to ask a question, just say hi.”
Almogalli recalled a time when, in uniform, she approached someone who she had gone to high school with to greet them. The person was out with their family, whose faces turned worried when they saw a uniformed officer approaching, she said. She wants to ease away the fear people have when they see police.
She’s currently working full time and pursuing a master’s degree — and thanks her parents for her dedication to learning.
“I’m so grateful for my mom and my dad for believing in education, and fighting the systematic and cultural idea that females cannot go to school, ” she said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Kept from school as a girl, new district officer Saja Almogalli wants Winooski students to feel safe.