A Place That Feels Like Home

What does it mean to find a place that feels like home?

For my good friend and Principal Diamond Jefferies, that feeling is what brought her to ICS and what has kept her here. When she first joined our team as an Assistant Principal over five years ago, she quickly realized something powerful about this community. “ICS feels like home,” she shared, “and I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.”

Home, for Diamond, isn’t just a building. It’s a community rooted in faith, peace, love, and joy—the core values that shape her leadership and her vision for our school. It’s a place where teachers feel supported, students feel seen, and every person who walks through the doors feels embraced for exactly who they are.

A Home for Students Who Need One Most

Diamond’s words reflect what so many of our students experience each day.

At ICS, children from all over the world, many of them immigrants or refugees, learn side by side. Some have fled conflict. Some have had their education interrupted. Many are far from the place they once called home.

And yet, when they walk through our doors, something changes.

They see teachers and classmates who look like them.

They see their cultures celebrated.

They hear their home language spoken.

They find safety, acceptance, and belonging.

ICS becomes a place where learning can begin again, where hope can take root, and where home is rebuilt in community. This is what makes ICS more than a school, and why we’re dreaming even bigger for the years ahead.

Help Us Give More Students a Place to Call Home

We want to extend this same sense of home to even more families by expanding our grade levels and growing into early learning and middle school programs.

To do that, we’re pursuing a new home for ICS that is closer to Clarkston, where most of our families live and where the needs are greatest. This move isn’t just about more space. It’s about planting ourselves in the heart of the community we serve.

Our vision is a campus where education, family services, and community supports all live under one roof. A place where 30+ partners share the same mission and the same hallways, working together daily to ensure every child has what they need to thrive. 

Families will have direct access to comprehensive wraparound services like nutritious food, preventative healthcare, educational pathways, and job training. By bringing each partner’s strengths to the table and aligning them with our community’s most pressing challenges, ICS becomes a center of real-time support, opportunity, and hope.

This is the future we’re building. And we’d love for you to be part of it.

This season, you can Give the Gift of Transformation—for our current students and their families, for the new students we will welcome, and for our teachers, staff, partners, and the community.

Your generosity helps us ensure that everyone who walks through our doors finds a place where they belong, where they can grow, and where their potential becomes possibility.