Inter-American Magnet School

Inter-American Magnet School (IAMS; Spanish: Escuela Inter-Americana) is a K-8 magnet school in Lake View, Chicago, Illinois. The oldest two-way bilingual school in the Midwestern United States, it is a part of Chicago Public Schools (CPS).

Children learn to speak, read and write fluently in Spanish and English. One of few public schools to be founded by parents, the school serves over 650 ethnically and economically diverse preschool through 8th grade students from all over Chicago. The school is affiliated with the International Spanish Academy of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Sciences and is located at 851 West Waveland Ave. Chicago, Illinois.

Inter-American was started by parents who desired a multilingual school for their children. Adela Coronado-Greeley and Janet Nolan cofounded the school and became teachers there. It first opened with only preschool in 1975. The preschool opened in September 1975 in two rooms in the old Bartelme School in Rogers Park where Janet and Addy Tellez were the only teachers. A single bus provided transportation for the students. The school added new grade levels in subsequent years.

At the end of the year, the Board considered dropping the program, but the Parent Advisory Council (PAC), headed by Adela Coronado-Greeley, persuaded the Board members to expand the program instead, and a kindergarten was added for 1976. The next year, the Board extended the program to first grade and, subsequently, a grade was added each year. In 1978, IAMS moved into LeMoyne School, east of Wrigley Field.

Intense lobbying by IAMS parents paid off in 1983, when the school won its own site, in a temporary building in Lakeview. The new location was the home of Robert Morris Elementary School, which had been a Lakeview neighborhood school since the late nineteenth century. In 1983 the school moved into its dedicated campus. While some Morris teachers and students left the school, most remained when IAMS moved in. IAMS graduated its first class of eighth graders in 1985.

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