The International Community School in Decatur, GA got a great write-up in the New York Times. It’s good that they decided to reach out to one of our schools. Maybe having David Pogue speak at our state technology conference helped a bit.
By the way, you can listen to selected speakers from the conference here on the conference podcast page.
More than half the 380 students at this unusual school outside Atlanta are refugees from some 40 countries, many torn by war. The other students come from low-income families in the community, and from middle- and upper-middle-class families in the surrounding area who want to expose their children to other cultures. Together they form an eclectic community of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims, well-off and poor, of established local families and new arrivals who collectively speak about 50 languages.
“The fact that we don’t have anything in common is what we all have in common,” said Shell Ramirez, an American parent with two children at the school.
The International Community School, which goes from kindergarten through sixth grade, began five years ago to address a pressing local problem — how to educate a flood of young refugees. It has evolved into a laboratory for the art of getting along, a place that embraces the idea that people from different cultures and classes can benefit each other, even as administrators, teachers and parents acknowledge the many practical difficulties.
For example, the school’s weekly newsletter is published in six languages; yet it still is not intelligible to many parents. Some refugee children arrive at the school having never seen a book. And while the school devotes extraordinary energy to a specialized curriculum designed for refugees, it must still satisfy exacting American parents.
The children of these refugees present unique challenges for the school. Many suffer post-traumatic stress from the horrors they have witnessed. Few speak English when they arrive. Some have no formal education and are illiterate and innumerate, even in their native tongues.
To complicate matters, many refugee parents cannot help with homework or understand report cards.
Some children have had to be taught to stand in line, or the significance of raising one’s hand.
Linda Dorage, who teaches English as a second language at the school, said she has even had to introduce children to “just the concept of a two-dimensional image meaning something.”
One early student, a goat herder from Mauritania, did not know how to use a door knob. A Sudanese girl was so traumatized from war and relocation that she insisted on sitting on the floor beneath her desk each day.
“The teacher decided she would go under the desk with her and do lessons under there,” Ms. Thompson said. “She lured her out in her own good time.”
