Khalil Gibran International Academy

Khalil Gibran International Academy
Address
362 Schermerhorn Street Brooklyn, New York 11217
Information
School type	Public high school
Founded	2007
School board	New York City Department of Education
School district	13
School number	592
Principal	Winston Haman
Grades	9 - 11
Enrollment	180 (October 2014)
Language	English and Arabic
Website	khalilgibranhs.org

The Khalil Gibran International Academy is a public school in Brooklyn, New York City, New York that opened in September 2007 with about 60 sixth grade students. As the first English-Arabic public school in the country to offer a curriculum emphasizing the study of Arabic language and culture, it has been placed at the centre of controversy by opponentsKhalil Gibran, the school's namesake, was a Lebanese-American Christian Maronite poet.

The committee that designed the school included the original principal Debbie Almontaser (a former teacher and community activist) and several nonprofit groups, including Lutheran Medical Center, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Salaam Club of New York, and the lead partner, the Arab American Family Support Center, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit.

The school's stated mission includes providing a "multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction".

Further, the federal government has stated that the country is in critical need of Arabic and Chinese speakers, and grants have been given out for schools teaching those subjects. Modern Arabic language is a dialect continuum with two dozen varieties that might be considered languages in their own right. They are the majority language in 20 countries of the Arab world, which has a population of some 325 million people.

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