Community School, Tehran

The Community school (Persian: مدرسه آمريكاى، تهران) was founded as a boarding school in Tehran, Iran, for the children of Presbyterian missionaries from the United States who were stationed in Iran since the 1830s. In the late 1940s, the school moved from its location at Qavām os-Saltaneh Street to Kucheh Marizkhaneh (Hospital Drive) near Jaleh Street until the summer of 1979 when it was permanently shut down by the new Islamic government. after the revolution the school was renamed Modares Shahed school which is now reserved for the children of the war veterans.

The new campus had been an old Presbyterian missionary hospital during World War II where the last Queen of Iran, Farah Pahlavi Diba, was born. After the war, it was returned to the missionaries to be used as the school campus and J. Richard Irvine was hired as its headmaster in 1951. The large, tree-filled shady compound had several buildings, a small church, and walking paths.

The Presbyterian missionary school established itself in the early 1900s in Hamadan, Western Persia (as it was known by the West then), growing from a "home school" into a formal school. In the 1930s the school moved to Tehran due to logistical considerations, located on Qavām os-Saltaneh Street and had slightly more than 200 students. By the 1950s only a few of the students were children of missionaries as the number of Iranians and foreign students increased. It was commonly called the "American School", because students were taught primarily in English, with French and Persian as secondary languages. Classes met Monday through Thursday and on Saturdays, eventually switching to a permanent Saturday through Wednesday schedule (with Friday as the common holy day). With the exception of some of the Americans, most of the students spoke two or more languages.

The expatriate population of Persia in the early 1900s, in the reign of Ahmad Shah Qajar, was very small and consisted mainly of British interested in the execution of the business of their colonial empire. Some of the expatriate population included Swedish officers of the early Persian Gendarmerie, and Russian officers of Cossack brigades which largely made up the Iranian military. It was from just such a Cossack brigade that Reza Shah came to prominence. American presence in Persia was relatively small at that time, and consisted largely of missionaries. The Presbyterian missionaries had a delicate relationship with the Persian government, which found it easier to appease irritation in the Islamic establishment by restricting Christian religious activities at the school.

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