Arab America Profiles KEYS Grace Academy.
Arab America's national feature spotlighted KEYS Grace Academy in Madison Heights — the first Chaldean/Assyrian charter school in the United States — and the community-rooted education model that gave rise to KEYS Food Service.
Originally featured by Weam Namou for Arab America · September 13, 2017
In September 2017, the national outlet Arab America published a feature — written by Ambassador Blogger Weam Namou — profiling KEYS Grace Academy as a school built to preserve Mesopotamian languages and history through education. The piece introduced a wider audience to the community-rooted education model that would go on to give rise to KEYS Food Service.
A first of its kind
KEYS Grace Academy was co-founded in 2015 by Nathan Kalasho along with his father Asaad, mother Neran, sister Nadine, and brother Dylan. Located in Madison Heights, Michigan, it is the first and only Chaldean/Assyrian centered charter school in the United States. It serves students of Middle Eastern backgrounds whose families originate in 14 different countries and more than 20 communities across Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne counties.
The school provides free busing and food to all children, and offers on-site legal aid and a medical clinic for parents inside the building. It opened with 250 students — a number that doubled within a year.
Language & curriculum
While children learn English, the curriculum includes mandatory teaching of Sureth (Syriac) and Spanish as a second language — preserving heritage while building the toolkit for a 21st-century, multilingual future. The school's stated mission is to prepare students to think and succeed in a diverse, technological, and ever-changing world through partnership between home, school, and community.
The garden
One of the school's defining features is its student garden. Each year, students plant and harvest approximately three tons of crops — peppers, zucchini, broccoli, carrots, squash, onions, beets, and watermelon among them — and distribute them to the surrounding neighborhood through a recommendation sheet on the school's Facebook page. Different grades plant different crops depending on the level of care each requires, and an on-site greenhouse is tended primarily by 8th-grade students through the school's "Garden Buddy" program.
"We're a school for all. This garden is a mirror to that. The students plant the garden and harvest approximately three tons of crops which they then distribute to the neighborhood."
The library & the school environment
The library was designed by Dylan Kalasho to feel outgoing and trendy — a place where children would want to stay for hours. Every item on the shelves carries a story; the goal is to spark curiosity and keep students asking questions. The school is a green school: a healthy food program runs throughout, much of the artwork is built from recycled material, and drinking fountains provide filtered water so students can refill personal water bottles. Repurposed kindergarten bookshelves now grow eggplants and cucumbers in the garden.
Why it matters to KEYS Food Service
KEYS Grace Academy is where KEYS Food Service began. The same commitment that drives the school — community-rooted, healthy, inclusive, and operationally serious — is the foundation of how KEYS now feeds students across Michigan.
Read the full feature by Weam Namou on Arab America: arabamerica.com/first-chaldean-charter-school-u-s-promotes-language-history.