When Alla Pearce came to Mecklenburg County 11 years ago, she thought she’d have little chance to speak Russian and Ukrainian, the languages she grew up with. She taught English in Ukraine and married an American.
“I did not think my languages would be useful at any point of my life. I thought, you know, it’s so rare. Nobody ever speaks it,” she said.
But that changed — slowly at first, then rapidly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Like Pearce, many Ukrainians speak Russian. So do residents of other former Soviet Union republics.
“TV was in Russian. Books were in Russian. So we do speak both languages,” Pearce said.
Last year that pushed Russian to the third most common language spoken in the homes of students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, after English and Spanish. Russian edged past Vietnamese, which had held the third spot for years.
“Yesterday I went to Costco, I heard like five people speaking Russian,” Pearce said. “I told my husband, like, what is going on? Truly, like everywhere you go you hear it.”
The last Census tally found just over 7,000 Russians and 4,000 Ukrainians living in Mecklenburg County. But that was taken in 2021, before the influx. CMS had 1,000 students from Russian-speaking homes last year. That’s not a huge number in a district with about 142,000 students.
Drawn by schools and safety
But the Russian voices are especially noticeable in the southern part of the county, where Pearce lives, and in parts of Union County. Pearce says Facebook groups for Ukrainians and Russians in Charlotte recommend those areas.
“Ballantyne and Matthews are the most popular areas in (the) Ukrainian/Russian community, considered being safe and good school ratings and good areas to grow or bring up your children,” Pearce said.
Nadja Trez, who’s in charge of CMS programs for students learning English, says it’s a combination of word of mouth and refugee agencies that work with apartment complexes to resettle families in that area. She says Mint Hill Elementary has seen an especially large number of Russian-speaking students in the two years since it opened.
Pearce now teaches English as a second language in CMS. This summer she’s working at South Pine Elementary, one of six locations for a program that helps newly arrived students start learning English and school procedures, as well as math and reading.
Hearing one of her colleagues, Racina Brown, call out names of children in class — Bianca, Jaroslav, Ramcharan, Luis, Carolina, Santiago, Ivan — hints at the international diversity.
At South Pine and Independence High, the site that serves older students in southern Mecklenburg County, almost half of students in the summer program for newcomers are from Russian-speaking families.
The sessions include hands-on activities that children can enjoy together even if they don’t share a language yet. For instance, STEM teacher Catherine Schulte had elementary students build rafts from popsicle sticks and see whether they’d stay afloat with weight added.
Classes are taught in English, but Pearce says she now has plenty of opportunities to use Ukrainian and Russian.
“They come completely lost. They don’t speak the language. They don’t know the curriculum. They don’t know how to ask, ‘Where’s the bathroom? How can I get help? How do I get lunch?’ So whenever they hear that I speak Ukrainian, Russian, they look at me like, ‘Please help me. Please,’ ” Pearce said.
And a familiar language can be a source of comfort for students who sorely need it: “A lot of these children come from a lot of traumatic experiences, especially Ukrainian children. You know, some of them have been educated in bomb shelters.”
One family’s experience
Two years ago Solomiia Nedavnii, now 10, was one of those children who arrived fleeing the war. Her parents, Slavik Nedavnii and Viktoriia Nedavnia, told their story through a CMS interpreter. They speak only Ukrainian.
They were living in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv that faced one of the most brutal attacks in the early invasion. “We had an apartment there," Slavik Nedavnii said. "And at that time when we left the town it was occupied by Russians, and they destroyed everything. They destroyed our property.”
Nedavnii said they fled through Europe and settled in the Charlotte area because they’re Baptists and this area has a lot of Baptist churches. They arrived on July 4, 2022, and live in Matthews, near a Ukrainian Baptist church, he said.
“Charlotte has a wonderful Ukrainian community, people who support us. Everyone who arrives here from Ukraine they support a lot, they help a lot,” he said.
Nedavnii says affordable housing is a big factor for new arrivals as well. He said they heard that Ballantyne was best for finding an apartment, while Ukrainians who want to rent houses tend to go to Monroe or Indian Trail in Union County.
Solomiia enrolled at Mint Hill Elementary. Viktoriia Nedavnia said her daughter quickly adapted in a school that had just opened, where everyone else was new too. Solomiia and her 5-year-old sister, Melaniia, have both picked up English so well that the parents say they have to remind them to speak Ukrainian at home. Melaniia will start kindergarten in August.
The parents both work, not only to support their own family but to send money back to Ukraine. The family is here on a two-year Uniting for Ukraine asylum program, and they’re up for renewal. Nedavnii says his family wouldn’t stay if the government rejects their renewal application, but the girls are already starting to feel like Americans.
Nedavnii emphasizes over and over how grateful the family is that Americans are giving them an opportunity. He says that Ukrainian congregations always pray, not just for the people they left behind but for the American people — prayers of gratitude, and also prayers that America will keep providing support to protect the children and families of Ukraine.
Pearce, the ESL teacher, says gratitude is a common theme when she speaks to Ukrainian parents at the summer program as well.
“A lot of them come up to me and say, ‘How much does this cost?’ or ‘Do we have to buy some books?’ I say, ‘No, you don’t have to buy anything. You just have to bring your child to the bus stop or to the school,’” she said. “And some of them quite literally start crying, because they’ve never been offered anything for free. And, you know, they came here thinking no one was willing to help them, but there are so many people who are.”
In CMS, the children of Ukraine and Russia mingle with more than 50,000 children whose families speak 194 native languages other than English. With no sign that peace is coming to Ukraine, Pearce predicts their numbers will keep growing in the coming school year.
