A world of differences in one American school

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 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. 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. The school must still satisfy exacting American parents.

Nearly a year ago, New York made plans to ban the use of electric shocks as a punishment for bad behavior, a therapy used at a Massachusetts school where New York State had long sent some of its most challenging special education students.

But state officials trying to limit New York’s association with the school, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Centre in Canton, southwest of Boston, and its “aversive therapy” practices have found a large obstacle in their paths: parents of students who are given shocks. “I understand people who don’t know about it think it is cruel,” said Susan Handon of Jamaica, Queens, whose 20-year-old daughter, Crystal, has been at Rotenberg for four years. “But she is not permanently scarred and she has really learned that certain behaviors like running up and hitting people in the face, are not acceptable.”

Indeed, Rotenberg is full of children who will run up and hit strangers in the face, or worse. Many have severe types of dysfunction, including self-mutilation, head banging, and eye gouging and biting. Parents tend to be referred there by desperate education officials, after other institutions have decided they cannot keep the child.

Refugee children there receive daily classes in English as a second language, and additional individual instruction based on their needs. There is after-school 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.

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