After 20 years on the move, a school for children with North Korean backgrounds gets a permanent home Related Article A quiet wish from North Korean defector youths Children of North Korean defectors born in third countries face discrimination, legal blind spots Young defector dreams of being on the silver screen Not in my backyard From cattle to classrooms A different kind of student

The Ministry of Unification, Hyundai Motor and Seoul's education office signed a deal to build Yeomyung School a campus it won't have to leave — closing out two decades of leases and rejection. For more than 20 years, Yeomyung School — the only accredited middle and high school in Seoul for young people with North Korean backgrounds — has been looking for a place to call its own. Now, it finally found one. Founded in 2004, Yeomyung has been bounced three times and even blocked once outright, when an entire Seoul neighborhood organized to keep it out. A memorandum of understanding signed Friday between the Ministry of Unification, Hyundai Motor Group, Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and Yeomyung itself will fund a new, four-story building for the school in Gangseo District, western Seoul, on the site it currently shares with a shuttered public elementary school. Hyundai will contribute 6 billion won ($4.3 million) of the total 16 billion won project cost. The ministry and the Seoul education office are providing continued funding and the land itself, and Yeomyung's own nonprofit foundation is adding 10 billion won it raised over the years from 1,123 individual donors. For a school with a two-decade history of being asked to leave, the deal marks a genuine turning point — though, as its principal made clear, not quite the finish line. Yeomyung was founded by a coalition of Protestant churches to serve young North Korean defectors who struggle to keep up in South Korean society and its mainstream education. It moved to Myeongdong, in the shadow of Mount Namsan, in February 2008, gained formal accreditation for its high school curriculum two years later, and stayed 15 years. Its real trouble began in 2019, when it tried to buy government-owned land in Eunpyeong District, in northwestern Seoul, to build a permanent campus. Residents blocked it. Principal Cho Myeong-sook, who first encountered North Korean defectors in 1997 during her honeymoon in China, has worked at Yeomyung since its founding and led it since 2021. She recalled what she was told to her face during the Eunpyeong fight. "They told me directly they were worried property values would fall, and that their own children would end up mixing with ours," Cho told the Korea JoongAng Daily. "I couldn't understand it. Why would we affect anyone's property values?" After the plan collapsed, Cho — then the school's vice principal — took the fight public. "Where can our defector youth go," she wrote in an online petition, "when they don't even have a mother left to kneel and beg on their behalf?" It didn't work. The rezoning request stalled, and Yeomyung's lease in central Seoul ran out without a next address secured. Cho said students followed the backlash online despite being told not to. She recalled one calling her, crying, late one night after reading hostile comments under a news article about the school. "The student asked, '[We] risked our lives to get to South Korea — why are they telling us to go back?'" Cho said, tearing up at the memory. "I had no words. I just said I was sorry, and we cried together." Even Friday's deal took some convincing. The district office and the Seoul education office were initially reluctant to back a new push, mindful of what had happened in Eunpyeong. Their full support only came together in recent months. Yeomyung relocated to its current site — the first two floors of a public elementary school that closed in March 2020, as Korea's falling birthrate emptied its classrooms — in August 2023, a temporary arrangement whose usage permit runs out in February 2027, roughly two years before the new building is due to be finished. At the gate, a newer plaque for Yeomyung has been bolted on just below the old school's sign. Cho said she is hoping for a further extension to bridge the gap, and is counting, in part, on visibility to make officials less willing to say no this time. Hyundai, Korea's top automaker, reached out first aft...