Is each human life equally valuable? Does each person deserve the same opportunity to live a life of his or her choosing? Affirmative answers to these two questions are at the core of a complaint brought against the Pittsburgh Public Schools last Monday. Somali refugee families alleged district failures have kept their children isolated, harassed and left out of school programs and activities.

		Eric Hartman is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches Democratic Citizenship in the College of General Studies' Public Service program, (ehartman@pitt.edu).

Let's be clear: These children have endured not just a fight or two and a bit of name-calling, but repeated and regular beatings on the bus and in bathrooms, and an environment where more than once other students have refused to drink from the same water fountains as them. The refugee parents typically have no experience with a bureaucratic school system, and often have little English ability. So each small barb, stinging slur and post-pubescent punch becomes part of a pattern in which -- because of a lack of interpreters in the school system -- these individual injustices build and boil inside students and parents with no outlet for their fair concerns.

Let there be no doubt that the Somali students have a fair grievance to file with the world: They were born at war or in a poverty-stricken jail euphemistically termed a refugee camp and the oldest among them spent over a decade there. Let there also be no doubt that many wonderful people working for the public schools are doing all they can to help the students learn English and adapt to life in Pittsburgh. But the formal legal complaint is about neither the Somalis' fair grievance with the world nor the many wonderful people doing all they can as individuals. The complaint is about whether the policies enacted by the Pittsburgh Public Schools do enough to recognize the equal value of all human life, and every person's equality of opportunity within it.

A close look at the refugees lives, here in Pittsburgh and before arrival, demonstrates again and again how good works must be supported by just policies in order for all people to truly have a full human experience.

I have been fortunate over the past several months to oversee 15 University of Pittsburgh students tutoring Somali refugee children in Lawrenceville, Point Breeze and East Liberty for over 2,000 hours. Despite their exams, the typical distractions of college life and the need to navigate public transit on cold, snowy nights, these students recited ABCs, read books and tackled tongue twisters. Pairs of students committed to individual Somali families because the Somalis taught them about a way of life, about perseverance and about an appetite for education. The students also learned about how our international institutions deny the humanity of millions of refugees now trapped in camps.

The beauty of this service-learning course -- the students were all studying Democratic Citizenship -- was its simplicity: connect college students who want to serve with children who wish to learn.

But of course it's not that simple, and the lessons learned from the Somalis are marred by the unnecessary violence and deprivation they faced first in a country torn by war and later, for over a decade, in a refugee camp in Kenya.

Over 11 million people around the world currently experience life as refugees. The Pitt students learned about camp conditions through their Somali families and also from guest speakers such as Brandon Cohen, a 2004 Pitt graduate and co-founder of Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment (FORGE). Another effort beautiful for its simplicity, FORGE gets college students to raise money to pay their own way to volunteer in refugee camps throughout Africa. They do this because the current situation of refugees is fundamentally unjust.

People in refugee camps lack even the most fundamental rights. They often may not leave, so they have no freedom of movement. Because they cannot leave, they regularly cannot work; they are deprived of even that most basic right of self-sufficiency. FORGE improves the life conditions of refugees. They've developed sports leagues, taught lessons where there are few or no schools and built the largest library in any refugee camp in the world. They're giving people opportunities to live better while they're in camps and to succeed when they leave camps.

I hope and believe that the goodwill of countless more Pittsburghers is expressed as people continue to volunteer through synagogues, mosques, churches and the Pittsburgh Refugee Center. The first way we can value all people equally is to make sure each person experiences equal opportunity here. Even that is hard enough: I am still looking for five more students interested in taking part in this course experience next year.

But my students' efforts as literacy tutors, individuals giving extra instructional time in the city school system and the good work of FORGE are mere palliatives if we do not change our policies.

International institutions permit a situation where over 7 million people around the world have been in refugee camps for over a decade. While most Americans share the assumption that all human life matters equally, our international system is absolutely inadequate in addressing the fundamental rights of people pushed out of their countries due to reasonable fears for their lives.

In many cases refugees' situations would be improved if the country where they were pushed would simply recognize them as valuable members of the work force.

Zambia provided Angolan refugees with plots of land for farming and watched its gross domestic product increase. It fell again when they began leaving.

As a global power that played a pivotal role in founding the United Nations, the United States should be leading other countries to value all people equally. The United States must also recommit itself to that fundamental ideal.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants is pushing a resolution through Congress that calls for an end to what is called refugee warehousing -- conditions that place refugees in camps for 10 years or more.

One of the first lessons in Democratic Citizenship is intuitive to students who seek out service-learning courses: We all matter equally. A subsequent lesson is more difficult but carries broader influence: Our policy choices matter deeply and reflect our most fundamental ethics. Currently the United States and the United Nations choose an inhumane response to refugee concerns. As a global community, we warehouse those who don't belong, those people who find themselves, often through no cause of their own, stateless.

Americans are often cynical at the notion of a strong policy effect on people's lives. Yet the thought of our free and happy 11-year-old Somali friends spending the first decade of their lives in squalid camps and without education makes the need for action abundantly clear.

Pittsburghers who care about the life opportunities of other human beings have many options related to refugees. Volunteers are needed as tutors and to help families adjust to life here. FORGE accepts applications from young people to address refugees' immediate concerns in camps.

And our congressional representatives must hear that the public supports the resolution to end warehousing. These are all concrete steps that individuals who care about the equal value of human lives may take immediately.

The Education Law Center and Pittsburgh Public Schools will resolve our current local policy concerns. Ideally, the end result will more completely honor our collective humanity. Regardless of the outcome, the ELC has chosen to air an important concern.

Refugees are fundamentally voiceless. They're not only cut off from much of the world in camps; their statelessness also means they lack any representation. Our world will reflect the equal value of human life only when we build our institutions to do so.