Germany refugees

Students in a welcome class for migrants attend a German language lesson at the Sankt Franziskus school in Berlin, Germany, Jan. 22, 2016.

There are about 400,000 refugee kids in Germany. Educating them is a ‘national task.’

Justice

Can Germany’s education system meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of refugee children? Some educators say there’s a strategy in place. Others say there’s not enough support or training and that the decentralized system is unprepared for what’s become a “national task.”

A man who identifies himself as a migrant takes a selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel outside a refugee camp near the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees in Berlin, Germany, Sept. 10, 2015.

For many Germans, this election is about refugees

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Christa Schmidt at the table in her apartment in Traunreut where she tutors refugees in German. Schmidt’s parents were German refugees from Romania.

A small German city finds it’s not easy welcoming hundreds of Syrian refugees

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Wesam Daas, left, with Carnival revelers in Altenmarkt, Bavaria.

After fleeing Palmyra, this Syrian family is trying to find home in small-town Germany

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A congregation at the Evangelical Lutheran Trinity Church and Community in Berlin.

This evangelical church in Berlin is helping Iranians looking for asylum

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Golzow mayor Frank Schütz, left, leans over to whisper a question to Rasha Haimoud during a holiday concert. She and her husband, Ahmad Haimoud, are refugees who settled in the small former East German town after escaping the war in their native Syria

Worried about its future, this former East German city recruited Syrian refugees

Education

Compared to the rest of Germany, the economy in the former East Germany has struggled. In the small village of Golzow, the population had shrunk to the point where authorities were considering closing the village’s only elementary school. That’s when the town mayor invited Syrian refugee families to move in.