Global Village Project unveils new refugee girls' school

This global village project preparing to celebrate a major milestone for refugee education in our area. Maria Guzman live at the new facility with the first look inside before tomorrow's ribbon-cutting ceremony. Maria? Yes, Tom. For 17 years, this non-profit middle school operated from inside a church. But this month, this today and tomorrow, they're going to be celebrating their new campus. And these girls are here. This is where they are attending school since October third. I'm going to go ahead and put my camera to show you guys the beautiful library and auditorium and also introduce you to Allison, who is the head of school. Allison, congratulations to you and your team for this huge accomplishment. How do you feel now having a campus you guys get to call home? It has been life-changing for our school and for our girls. We moved in in August. The space is just beautiful and it provides us so much room to do things that our girls need in their curriculum and to grow to serve more girls in the future. Talk to me about how this is going to help you guys to serve more. I know you guys have to sometimes turn down applicants. Yes, so we in our old facility can handle about 45 students total, and every year we'd have more girls come to apply than we had space for, and so we were turning away almost 50% of our applicants every year. And so that was the inspiration for building this new school. This new facility is 24,000 square feet, and we will be able to have up to 100 girls in our facility at a time. Plus additional services we can offer, additional programming, and just having our own space built just for our girls is life-changing. And walk me through this room. I know you guys have an auditorium that you're going to use soon, and this library is already in full use. so these are two spaces we're the proudest of so we're in the library right now reading and introduction to the English language is foundational to everything we do and so our girls are here in this space many times a day borrowing books taking them home returning them eagerly wanting to move up to the next reading level so this is a vibrant happy place in the school and in this room and here is our auditorium this is a space we did not have in our former location we do a lot of performances our girls do a lot of practice speaking from the stage singing and dancing performing plays having graduation and having a space dedicated just for that will be foundational awesome well thank you so much again they're doing the ribbon ceremony tomorrow so a really big milestone here at this campus what an incredible resource that they provide these young girls Maria Guzman with the ribbon cutting coming up here tomorrow Maria thanks so much