When Rezwan Kohistani arrived for his first day at Webb City High School in January, he was led on a tour of the building, paired up with a student who accompanied him to homeroom and met one of his two English language teachers.
No one could speak the 14 year old’s dialect of Dari, so he resorted to using Google Translate to communicate.
He also met Principal Josh Flora, who said the newly arrived teenager from Afghanistan appeared happy.
Now Flora reflects on that first day and what led up to Kohistani’s May 5 death on school grounds. His body was discovered near a school baseball field in what authorities believe was a suicide. No foul play is suspected, but his death remains under investigation pending an autopsy report. Some in the community say the teen was bullied.
“No parent ever imagines having to bury their child,” the teen’s father Lemar Kohistani said in a statement released by the Afghan American Foundation. “Rezwan was a bright light in our life.”
The teen’s death has left his family, the school district and the community yearning for answers. It has also raised questions about the decision behind placing the Kohistanis in a rural town of about 13,000 people with a minuscule Muslim population. The freshman was the school’s first student ever from Afghanistan. Advocates say refugees need culturally appropriate services for the unique challenges newly arrived residents face, from learning English to mental health care.
Superintendent Tony Rossetti contended that the situation was complicated, as the school grappled with a lack of translators and guidance to support Kohistani, who fled violence in Afghanistan last fall.
“We’re doing what we know,” Rossetti said. “There’s been very little guidance.”
The first day of school
Kohistani was brought to homeroom alongside the upperclassman he’d been matched with and an English language teacher. There, he met classmates and 14 other students enrolled in the school’s English language courses, most of whom came from Spanish speaking countries.
Rossetti said the aim was to keep these students’ schedules close so they could talk to each other and develop a sense of community, a strategy local nonprofits told school officials was important.
After class, Flora and a counselor met with Kohistani to talk about his schedule and set up occasional meetings. The teen was never brought in to meet with any mental health services, Flora said, though a teacher had explained where to go if he needed help.
At the end of the day, administrators helped get a hotspot setup on Kohistani’s phone after learning that his new home did not have WiFi to access the internet.
Finding justice
Rossetti’s voice shook as he recalled the morning Kohistani’s body was found at the high school.
“We’ve tried to do the right thing by our students and our parents,” he said. “To be honest we don’t know 100% whether the experience Rezwan had at our high school had any influence on what happened. We’re hoping the investigation provides some answers to the family and to us.”
The 14 year old’s death has left his family devastated, said Lemar Kohistani, who called on local and federal authorities to investigate the factors contributing to his son’s death.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has echoed that request.
According to Yasir Ali, board chair of the group’s Missouri chapter, the organization is committed on a national level to pushing the community, police and school to get to the bottom of what happened.
He said the incident speaks to a larger crisis about how Afghan refugees have been resettled in the U.S.
“You bring them from one place and send them to a place where few other people of the same culture, ethnicity, religion belong,” he said.
“They need support. They need to be in areas where there are larger communities, in this case Afghan families and Muslim families where they can acclimate themselves to the culture very easily.”
Rebekah Thomas, director of the Springfield office of the International Institute of St. Louis, which helped settle the Kohistani family, contends the Joplin area was an ideal place.
She said there was a high availability of housing, quality English language and job readiness programs, and a community sponsorship program through the local nonprofit, RAISE.
The organization was responsible for getting Kohistani enrolled at Webb City High School and, according to Thomas, has resettled and provided services to nearly 100 other refugees across the region.
RAISE has not responded to multiple requests for comment. It also has not responded to requests to view their tax returns, which the Internal Revenue Service requires to be filed and made available for public inspection.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement said it is working with a nonprofit to provide behavioral health services directly to the Kohistani family and community members in the wake of the tragedy.
The family has publicly stated that they will be relocating to Texas following their son’s death. As of Thursday, a fundraiser to support the family’s resettlement has raised over $32,000.
‘Struggling times’
Flora, the school principal, said Kohistani appeared to have friends, and was even popular. The teen often made videos with friends and spent time on TikTok, he said.
If there was any indication Kohistani was struggling mentally or being bullied, he added, his English language instructor would have reported it.
But despite allegations of bullying, Rossetti said no incidents had been filed with school officials.
“I’m not naive to say that we don’t have some of those things going on. We’re not a utopia,” he said.
“But I do believe that if he had issues there were friends and other people that he would have reached out to … From the very beginning he has been a very well liked young man. And I think that’s the reason everyone is so shocked.”
According to Rossetti, students can make a report through a school app.
Over the past five years the school has enrolled an increasing number of refugee children.
He said the district is looking at ways to better support their refugee population.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has secured a grant for schools to help handle the influx of Afghan refugee students, but the money has yet to come through.
“It’s one thing to get funding, but the other thing is what are the actual needs that need funding. And we’re still working through that,” Rossetti said.
Translators are difficult to come by around Joplin, Rossetti said. And while a Dari interpreter from RAISE reportedly helped the school communicate with Kohistani’s family, discussions to attract additional resources were not fruitful, he said.
“We’re trying to figure out how to address the specific needs of each of these different, new learners that we have and trying to get feedback to adjust,” he said.
“There’s some struggling times here.”
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(The Star’s Kevin Hardy contributed to this story.)
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