Teachers Turn to Internet To Bring Foreign Crisis Home

By Linda Jacobson

As they watch the news reports on the latest conflict in the Balkans and talk about the events in their classrooms, many students at Swift School in northeast Chicago are reliving what they experienced a few years ago.

About 130 of the students and two of the elementary school's teachers are from Bosnia, which declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. Now, it's the future of ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav republic of Serbia's Kosovo province that is at issue.

"We understand more maybe than anyone else the fate of the people in Kosovo because it was very similar to the fate of the Bosnian people," said Hika Berbic, a Bosnian bilingual teacher at Swift who spent time in a refugee camp before coming to the...