After 20 years on the move, a school for children with North Korean backgrounds gets a permanent home

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.

Not in my backyard

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.

From cattle to classrooms

Hyundai, Korea's top automaker, reached out first after the school's situation was covered in the news.

"We had nowhere left to turn," Cho said. "That's how it started."

It was not the first time outside support arrived unprompted.

Actor Cha In-pyo — a veteran leading man from the early days of K-dramas — met Cho while preparing for a defector role in the 2008 film "Crossing," and has quietly supported the school for nearly 20 years.

So has Kwon Oh-sub, chairman of L&P Cosmetic, the company behind the K-beauty sheet-mask brand Mediheal, whose connection ran through his wife, who volunteered at the school weekly during its Namsan years.

"People like that aren't the kind I could simply ask to meet," Cho said. "They came to us first."

Hyundai's own history with North Korea predates this donation by decades.

Founder Chung Ju-yung was born in what is now North Korea's Kangwon Province, and in 1998, he personally led a convoy of more than 500 heads of cattle across the DMZ to Pyongyang — a gesture widely credited with helping open a decade of inter-Korean economic exchange, including the Kaesong Industrial Complex.

Under Friday's agreement, Hyundai's support goes beyond construction.

According to the company's press release, it will send 20 college-student mentors to tutor Yeomyung students in English, math and science, run winter-break career-exploration sessions and build a mentorship network with alums.

Outstanding graduates who go on to university will be eligible for tuition and living-expense support through its scholarship program.

Retired U.S. diplomat Sung Kim, president of Hyundai Motor Company, signed the agreement on the company's behalf.

Kim spent much of his earlier career in foreign service on Korean Peninsula affairs, including as the chief U.S. negotiator to the six-party talks, U.S. special representative for North Korea policy and U.S. ambassador to Seoul.

"Given how long I worked on Korean Peninsula and North Korea issues, today feels like a genuinely meaningful event to be part of," he told the Korea JoongAng Daily.

A different kind of student

Yeomyung's roughly 100 students look different than they once did.

On a visit on Friday, the school's hallways were empty for summer break, but still lined with Korean-language classroom materials — commonly mispronounced sounds, frequently used idioms, a display headed "Welcome, is this your first time in Korea?" — alongside a map of the peninsula and student artwork.

The school once served almost entirely young defectors who had crossed the border themselves, but increasingly its students are children born in third countries, such as China, to North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers.

That shift has changed both curriculum and counseling.

Korean-language classes now run through school breaks for students who arrive speaking little or no Korean.

The two groups process it differently, said Choi Yeon-jeong, the school's counselor.

Border-crossing itself, however brutal, was something students survived — and surviving it, she said, often became a source of drive. 

"Kids from a defector background had such a strong will to survive," Choi said. "A lot of them would ask, 'How do I become a doctor?' or 'How do I get into Seoul National University?'"

Third-country-born children, by contrast, often grew up neglected, Choi said, with many of their mothers having been trafficked into marriages in China. When their mothers eventually fled to South Korea, frequently without telling their families, there was often no one left who could properly care for the child. 

"They ended up neglected or in real poverty, with no way to change that on their own," she said. "The rate of them having thoughts about suicide is much higher, too."

Yeomyung caps classes at around 10 students partly for that reason, and every student undergoes an annual psychological screening, followed by one-on-one sessions, art therapy, Chinese-language counseling or outside referrals as needed.

There is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-run STEM camp — hands-on science sessions taught by MIT student volunteers — which has run at Yeomyung for more than a decade.

"I get about 130 students that apply every year, and I only place 12 of them here," said Matt Burt, the managing director of the MIT-Korea Program. "It's one of the most competitive programs at MIT, actually."

Cho said that when she once asked students what kind of school they wanted, they described something simple: a nurse's office, a cafeteria, a science room, a playground.

"That's just an ordinary school," she said. "But for our kids — in the North, and even here in the South — getting something that ordinary took a miracle."

For Jeong Ha-min, a Yeomyung graduate who defected in 1998 and now works at the ministry's own resettlement center, the day carried a different kind of meaning.

"We're no longer just people who receive help," he said. "We've become members of this society who can give back, too."

Cho cried through nearly all of Friday's ceremony — not from grief this time, but relief — and the teachers behind her welled up watching her.

Outside, there was none of the opposition organizers had once feared; the street was quiet.

"It took 20 years before the dawn broke," Unification Minister Chung said, offering his own gloss on the school's name, which means "dawn" in Korean. "Now the sun is coming up, and Yeomyung is heading toward broad daylight."

Yeomyung expects to complete its move into the new building by early 2029.

A briefing session for Gangseo residents on the construction plans is set for August.

BY SEO JI-EUN [[email protected]]