Emily Patzer News Today

The students at the new East African Magnet Elementary in St. Paul are all ears when their principal, Abdisalam Adam, starts telling stories about herding goats and sheep in Somalia. Lions would cleverly approach a herd from upwind, he told fifth-graders when I visited the school recently. "Did you kill them?" one boy asked. "I was not old enough to kill a lion," Adam said. The lions didn't ...

After decades of declining enrollment, St. Paul Public Schools made a bold bet: offer families a school with support in seven different languages. The school’s first-time principal had one summer to get it done.

Tuesday marks one week since St. Paul's new East African Magnet School officially opened its doors to thousands of students.

St. Paul Public Schools will offer elementary students and their parents support in Arabic, Amharic, Oromo, Somali, Swahili, and Tigrinya.