A Founder Of The International Community School Will Be Honored

One of the founders of the will receive a national honor for a lifetime of working for social justice.

On Jan. 30, Sister Patty Caraher will receive a Lewis Hine Award for Service to Children and Youth from the National Child Labor Committee. The ceremony will take place at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

The International Community School, which has a campus in Avondale Estates, is one of the Atlanta area's best known public school because its student body is made up of children from DeKalb County's large immigrant population, as well as local American children.

The school has been profiled in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and other national media.

The NCLC said in a press release that Caraher

will be honored for her over half-century spent teaching, mentoring, and inspiring disenfranchised children and teens with education and social justice. She saw it as her calling to help them to become self-confident, treat others with mutual respect, and be the very best they can be.

As a young white Sinsinawa Dominican nun, Sister Patty taught at a segregated Catholic school in Alabama and witnessed the racism that the black families confronted. With the people, she became a vocal advocate against racism. While living in Florida, she set up a one-on-one afterschool tutoring program for children of migrant workers.

Then back in Atlanta, Sister Patty determined there was a need to educate refugee students in DeKalb County, one of the largest refugee resettlement areas in the United States. She co-created the International Community School (ICS), a charter school based in Decatur, Georgia, a suburb just outside Atlanta. Half of ICS’s nearly 400 students are refugees from war-torn countries; the other half are from either low-income families in Decatur, or middle- to upper-middle class families seeking to expose their children to other cultures.

The school has been praised for academic excellence, and for its goal of recreating what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community,” where persons of all ages, races, and classes can live in friendship and peace. The K-6 charter and IB World School advance the promise of America by cultivating voice, courage, and hope in refugee, immigrant, and local students. As part of ICS, Sister Patty helped create School-Within-the-School, a one-on-one tutoring program to help refugee youth acclimate to their new country.

The school now has campuses at Avondale Pattillo United Methodist Church in Avondale Estates and a Stone Mountain campus for fifth and sixth-graders, but  building at 2418 Wood Trail Lane outside Decatur.