Georgia School as a Laboratory for Getting Along
The New York Times
December 25, 2007
By WARREN ST. JOHN
The community effort to help refugees resembled countless others at this time of year, with an exception. The recipients were not many thousands of miles away. They were students in the school and their families.
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 Decatur, and from middle- and upper-middle-class families in the 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 one 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.
“If it were easy,” said a co-founder, Barbara Thompson, “everybody would be doing it.”
Refugees began arriving in Decatur in the 1990s, when aid agencies pegged the area as perfect for newcomers because of its low rents and proximity to jobs in downtown Atlanta, just 10 miles to the west. In the late ’90s, nearly 20,000 refugees arrived in Georgia, most to this area.
Soon this once mostly white suburb on the western side of Stone Mountain, a historical bastion of the Ku Klux Klan, had become one of the more culturally and ethnically diverse areas in the country.
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 innumerate and illiterate, 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 had 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 by 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 drew her out in her own good time.”
Addressing Unmet Need
Until the community school came along, most refugee children found themselves in conventional public schools. To understand the difference, it helps to visit the family of He Tha and Mya Mya, a Burmese husband and wife who arrived with their four children last summer after 25 years in refugee camps in Thailand.
The family now lives in a two-bedroom apartment, its walls bare except for a homemade shrine of hand-drawn figures in red and blue ink around a photograph of friends left behind. Written below the photo is, “Never say goodbye.”
Mr. He Tha’s eldest children – 15-year-old Monday and 18-year-old Baby Boy, who was given his name for arriving a month premature – were too old for the community school. They were placed at a high school, where they receive an hour of English instruction and spend the rest of the day in regular ninth-grade classes, even though they speak hardly a word of English.
Asked what it was like to spend hours in classes he could not understand, Baby Boy laughed and blushed.
“It’s boring,” he said.
Mr. He Tha’s younger two children – Tuesday Paw, 12, and Eh Dee Na Poe, 7 – attend the community school.
Refugee children there receive daily classes in English as a second language, and additional individual instruction based on their needs. There are after-school classes until 5:15 p.m. each weekday, along with art and music classes, and French and Spanish for all students. Classes are relatively small, 18 students on average, and each has an assistant to the teacher. Students wear uniforms – light blue or white collared shirts, and dark blue pants or skirts – so that clothing does not become a distracting status symbol.
Many on the staff understand the refugee experience first-hand. One survived the Rwandan genocide. The lunchroom lady is from Srebrenica, driven from the town during Serb soldiers’ massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian men and boys.
“I constantly remind them how lucky we are,” said Hodan Osman, 27, a tutor who at age 10 was separated from her parents during the civil war in Somalia.
“We could have been killed,” she said, “and not only are we here, but we’re in a place where we’re celebrated. I tell them they can take everything away from you, but your knowledge is in your head, and it makes you brave.”
Naza Orlovic, a teacher’s assistant from Bosnia, said her experience as a refugee allowed her to recognize and to soothe hurt feelings that frequently arose out of cultural misunderstandings. Ms. Orlovic recalled comforting a Liberian boy, who was upset when other students could not follow his jokes because of his thick West African accent.
“I said, ‘Tell them to me,’” Ms. Orlovic recalled, speaking in a thick Bosnian accent herself. “Because they don’t understand my jokes either.”
The school has classes for the parents and older siblings of refugee students. On Thursday nights, there are computer classes. On Saturdays, the school offers English classes and tutoring.
Mr. He Tha attends those classes, along with his wife, Baby Boy and Monday. Speaking through a translator, he said he hoped to learn a little English so he could get a job. But he added that the family’s prospects depended in large part on the education his children received.
“The future is done for us,” Mr. He Tha said, gesturing toward himself and his wife. “We are just support for our children. We don’t want to see them have the same problems we had.”
No ‘Enclave’ for Refugees
The community school was born a decade ago when Ms. Thompson, then a freelance writer, met William L. Moon, the principal at a prestigious private school in Atlanta, and Sister Patty Caraher, a Sinsinawa Dominican nun and social activist who once taught under segregation at an all-black high school in Mobile, Ala.. Each had done volunteer work on behalf of refugee children, and each had concluded that such children’s needs were not being met through conventional schooling.
The three conceived of a school that would include hours of individual attention and an empathetic environment. They hoped to model it on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion of “the beloved community,” where people of all races, nationalities and classes were accepted, and on the common schools established in the 19th century by Horace Mann.
