About
About Independence Charter School
Independence Charter School (ICS) is a community-oriented public K-8 charter school located in Center City Philadelphia. ICS began the 2008-2009 school year in its newly renovated building at 16th and Lombard Streets.
ICS’s primary mission is to provide an intellectually stimulating curriculum with an international focus. Our world culture curriculum emphasizes the arts, languages, ideas, and histories of numerous world cultures and supports second language acquisition. All students at ICS study Spanish within two distinct FLES programs: the Spanish Enhanced program, which includes 30 minutes of Spanish daily; or the Spanish Immersion program, in which students begin in Kindergarten with a 90% Spanish and 10% English infusion. By fifth grade that balance is 50/50. Older students are also introduced to Japanese and Arabic in once-weekly sessions, as they continue their Spanish studies. By the time they graduate, all ICS graduates are bilingual and biliterate in Spanish and have introductory knowledge and skills in Arabic and Japanese.
ICS serves over 700 students from almost every zip code in Philadelphia. It was founded in 2001 by a group of parents and community members devoted to raising their families in Philadelphia. These founding members developed ICS’s mission and program, and many remain instrumental today as parents of current students and in founder seats on our Board of Trustees.
Teachers
ICS could not achieve its results without our energetic, talented, and caring teachers. They bring to life our approach to cross-thematic teaching and they embody our international focus. Our teachers come from Chile, Colombia, Spain, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Russia, and the United States, to name just a few represented countries.
Family Involvement
As a community-based school, ICS relies on parents and other family members to enrich our students’ experience. Parents and other family members can get involved and give to the school in many ways—as volunteers, Board of Trustees members, and Board of Trustees committee members, and through financial and in-kind gifts.
