A School in Georgia as a Laboratory for Getting Along

[Harold F. Schiffman]

December 25, 2007
A School in Georgia as a Laboratory for Getting Along
By WARREN ST. JOHN

DECATUR, Ga.  Parents at an elementary school here gathered last Thursday
afternoon with a holiday mission: to prepare boxes of food for needy
families fleeing some of the worlds horrific civil wars. 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 dont 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 schools 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 ones 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 Thas 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. Its boring, he said. Mr. He Thas 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 were in a place where were 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 teachers 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 dont 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 familys 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 dont 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 childrens 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.

The mission, Ms. Thompson said, was never to create an enclave for
refugees only, because that would just separate them more. The founders
saw this formulation as not just idealistic but practical.  Studies have
shown that low-income students benefit academically from exposure to
middle- and upper-middle-class students. And Ms. Thompson and her
colleagues believed that exposure to a wide range of cultures and ethnic
backgrounds would appeal to affluent, socially minded parents. Ms.
Thompson, Mr. Moon and Sister Caraher received seed money from several
local charities and help from advocates for refugees and other concerned
neighbors. Mr. Moon assumed the role of principal. The school leased space
from a church and, in 2002, was granted charter status by the local school
board and the state.

There were plenty of early difficulties. The school was short on money.
Though it receives county, state and federal money, it must still raise
some $400,000 a year. Classrooms at the church were small and the tensions
high, particularly among children whose lack of English got in the way of
their expressing themselves. An effort to form a parent-teacher
association failed because of language differences; the sheer number of
translators needed for such meetings made them impractical. Early on, some
American parents who had been drawn to the community school because of its
small class sizes and curriculum French and Spanish from kindergarten on,
art and music for all students pulled out their children because they felt
the emphasis on refugees got in the way.

And some new arrivals to the school had to overcome intense trauma before
they could begin learning. Teachers noticed that two sisters from
Afghanistan seemed terrified as they arrived each day. As refugees in
Pakistan, the children had worked making carpets. Exhausted, they
regularly dozed at school, which drew beatings. The sisters had assumed
such beatings were standard at every school. Despite these challenges, the
school grew. A new grade was added each year. A second campus was opened
in space rented from another church a few miles away. Volunteers poured
in, mostly retired teachers and students from nearby Emory University and
Agnes Scott College. All the while, administrators and teachers said, the
school took its energy from the optimism many of its students had toward
their new lives in the United States. Sometimes that optimism was hard to
miss. One second grader from Congo is named Bill Clinton.

A Draw for Americans

The diversity at the community school extends to American families. Twenty
percent of the students are African-American, and roughly 10 percent are
white. About two-thirds of the students come from families that qualify
for reduced-price or free lunches, while some of the other students are
the children of doctors, lawyers and bankers. Parents from low-income
families tend to choose the school over other nearby public schools
because it is safe and has small classes. More affluent parents seek it
for the potential benefits of exposure to so many cultures. Most of the
middle- and upper-middle-class parents are social progressives from
Decatur, a liberal enclave. But not all. Harvey Clark, whose son Zade is
in the fifth grade, is a veteran of the Persian Gulf war and a Nascar fan.

Theyre getting exposed to cultures that they normally would not be exposed
to except in National Geographic, Mr. Clark said of the American children.
Instead of my boy having to go off to war to meet foreign people, he can
do it here in town. But the interactions between parents from so many
backgrounds are complicated. There is still no parent-teacher association
because of language barriers. American parents organize food drives for
newcomers, give them rides and help them connect with doctors when
children get sick.  But getting to know one other takes effort. My
children dont just know about the Iraq war; they know the difference
between Kurds and other Iraqis, said Shell Ramirez, who has a son and a
daughter at the school. But its not for everybody. Its something you have
to buy into.

Buying in may be easier for children than for adults. Consider the
friendship between Ms. Ramirezs 9-year-old son, Dante, and Soung Oo
Hlaing, an 11-year-old Burmese refugee with dwarfism. Dante likes to read
Harry Potter books and to play Shrek on his Wii video game console. He
lives in a comfortable house; his father works at a large consulting firm.
Until he arrived last summer, Soung had lived in a refugee camp in
Thailand. He spoke no English. His father supports the family by working
at a chicken processing plant for $10 an hour.

The two boys met on the first day of school this year. Despite the
language barrier, Dante managed to invite the newcomer to sit with him at
lunch. I didn't think he'd make friends at the beginning because he didn't
speak that much English, Dante said. So I thought I should be his friend.
In the next weeks, the boys had a sleepover. They trick-or-treated on
Soungs first Halloween. Soung, a gifted artist, gave Dante pointers on how
to draw. And Dante helped Soung with his English. I use simple words that
are easy to know and sometimes hand movements, Dante explained. For huge,
I would make my hands bigger. And for big, I would make my hands smaller
than for huge. Ms. Ramirez said that coordinating Dantes social life was
much more complicated than if he were at a more typical local school.
Slumber parties are definitely a pain, she said. It can be quite confusing
if one of the kids doesnt know his phone number and the parents dont speak
English.

But even so, Ms. Ramirez said she became close with Soungs family because
of the boys friendship. She drives them to appointments, has had them over
to bake cookies, and spent a recent weekend afternoon trying to program
the familys remote control. To celebrate an ethnic holiday, Soungs mother,
Mu De, recently gave Ms. Ramirez a traditional Burmese sarong. For now,
the women communicate mostly through gestures. But it will not be long
before Soung is translating. His English has improved markedly, enough so
that he regularly torments Dante with a reliable schoolyard prank: he
tapes a piece of paper bearing the words kick me on Dantes back. Theyre
two peas in a pod, Ms. Ramirez said.

Worthy of My Best Shot

The long-term prospects are far from certain. Because it is experimental,
the school is more at risk of closing if its students fail to make
adequate yearly progress, the standard by which the national education law
judges public schools. Academically, the school seems to be on track. It
has met the annual requirement under the No Child Left Behind education
law each of the past four years. And this year the school was one of two
for disadvantaged children that were commended by the Georgia Board of
Education. It was cited for closing the performance gap between low- and
high-scoring students, a feat that the school accomplished without
lowering its higher scores.

Ms. Thompson, Mr. Moon and Sister Caraher said a short-term goal was to
combine their two campuses. Mr. Moon said he wanted to open a health
clinic for refugees at the school. And supporters are trying to start a
school for refugee children who arrive in their teens, with less time than
younger refugees to make up for lost years. In the meantime, refugees
continue to arrive, most recently from Burundi, Eritrea and Burma (now
known as Myanmar), and some of their children will inevitably learn their
first words of English at the school. When you see those kids who are as
positive as they are, and you know what kind of problems theyre going
through, Mr. Moon said, you just say, This is worthy of my best shot.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/us/25school.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1198603915-w6G/WINi4TuxjSLqjS4/SQ

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