Featured Grantee

International Community School

Saturday School

The Family Learning Program, familiarly known as “Saturday School,” began three years ago. Its founders noticed that while younger refugee children tended to learn English quickly and integrate into their American schools, their older siblings had difficulty succeeding in the schools where they were placed.

Saturday School met for the first time in September 2004, with five students, all teenage sisters who had spent their childhood as carpet workers in Afghanistan and had recently arrived in the United States with refugee visas. The Taliban had killed their father and imprisoned their brother.

The girls arrived with an intense work ethic, yet they knew no English and couldn’t keep up with their peers in school. Saturday School designed itself around their needs: one-on-one attention emphasizing reading, writing, English and basic social and life skills.

The girls learned quickly and the word spread. Other refugee girls began to show up at the door on Saturday

afternoons, eager to learn. Before long, the teenagers began to bring their mothers and then their grandmothers, many of whom had never learned to read or write in their own languages and wanted to become self-sufficient in their new country.

The Atlanta Women’s Foundation awarded Saturday School its first grant. The program now offers classes for each generation, with an enrollment of 50 students and 15 volunteer tutors. The students come from countries such as Pakistan, Burma, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Liberia, Afghanistan and Guinea. This year, for the first time, Saturday School will become a yearlong program.

Today the five teenage girls who were Saturday School’s first students are fluent in English. They all maintain A and B averages, and one recently received a four-year academic scholarship to an Atlanta private school.