Mongolian immigrants looking for a new life in Glenview, Northbrook and surrounding communities are creating unique challenges for school districts and organizations providing educational and mental health services, officials said.
“Many people have helped,” said Tsegi Batmunkh, with the American Mongolian Association. “Not just Mongolians to each other but people from Korea, Poland and the American people.”
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Glenbrook North and Glenbrook South High Schools have seen an increase in their Mongolian student population, with Glenbrook HSD 225 serving 55 Mongolian-speaking students out of 400 who qualify for English language acquisition services, officials said. They said that as a comparison, in 2019, the school district was serving 13 Mongolian-speaking students out of 123 total who qualified for English language acquisition services.
“Frequently, groups tend to arrive/settle where there is an established community of people from a similar background and/or family as we are seeing with the Mongolian population,” district officials said in an email. “We hired a Mongolian teacher last summer and also have a Mongolian Family Language Liaison on staff but we are currently not hiring any new Mongolian staff members.”
The email also said language and Family Liaisons are staffed for major language groups to ensure students and their families have access to support both within the school and community resources during their time in high school. In addition finding texts and materials in Mongolian can be a challenge because of the limited resources available for purchase from publishers.
“Our population of Mongolian-speaking students and families tend to be very ambitious and proactively seek information about how to accelerate their students’ English-language development and how to navigate postsecondary education in the U.S.,” the email said.
“They’re doing a great job,” Batmunkh said of the school districts. “The library now has books in the Mongolian language.”
She said thousands of Mongolians have immigrated to the Chicago area since the 1990s and that because many spoke Polish, Russian or Korean they were able to assimilate and find jobs.
“Chicago is geographically and economically very convenient for us because it’s friendly to immigrants,” Batmunkh said. “The weather is very similar to Mongolia. So it’s an advantage.”
She said a second wave of Mongolians started coming after a 2010 mining boom in that country and that many continue to migrate to the north suburbs.
“Many women started working for Korean nail salons and ended up buying them,” said Batmunkh who now lives with her family in Arlington Heights, including two children went through the Glenview schools system.
“We wanted to send our kids to better schools which lead us to the suburbs,” she added. “My kids were not discriminated against in the schools in the Glenview area. I felt safe.”
But the influx of Mongolians has also put pressure on some local public health agencies which are working to get up to speed to assist new immigrants.
“Our hope is to continue to learn about and meet the needs of this community and provide the services directly through our clinician and our team,” said Renee Dominguez, co executive director of the Family Service Center in Northfield.
“We have to have all our legal documents translated into Mongolian and our website and our intake process,” she said. “It’s all process. We are moving through that process and we are working to provide information that is the easiest things we can push out right now in terms of reaching a lot of people efficiently.”
She also said providing clinical services to the immigrants can be difficult because the Mongolian language doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe things like depression, anxiety or stress and that like many places there is a “stigma” associated with mental health issues.
“The way it was described to us in that mental health concerns are sort of shunned in Mongolia and there’s not really treatment in the same way as here,” she said. “We want to remove barriers to be able to help people get a foot in the door and for them to start to get familiar with the idea of mental health wellness and support.”
Batmunkh said Mongolian immigrants to the Chicago area continue to make new homes here while at the same time celebrating their unique culture. She also said the Mongolian government in 2021 opened a Mongolian Consulate in Schaumburg, the third Mongolian consulate in America.
“We lobbied for three years and finally and the Mongolian Government decided to open a consulate office,” she said.
Brian L, Cox is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.