Piera Shaheen

DALTON, Ga. — David Shaheen says his mother Piera would have been thrilled to know that a high school has been named after her.

The Alliance Piera Barbaglia Shaheen Health Services Academy is scheduled to open in Los Angeles in early 2018.

“She always emphasized the importance of education to us,” David Shaheen said.

And it wasn’t only her children whose education she tried to further.

Piera Shaheen, who passed away in 2014, and her husband Shaheen Shaheen founded World Carpet in Dalton in 1954, and in addition to setting up profit sharing and health care programs for their employees, they set up a scholarship program for the employees’ children that provided college tuition for more than 2,000 students. They also set up a program to help employees who had not graduated high school earn their GED.

So when David Shaheen and his wife Linda, who have a home in Los Angeles, were looking for a way to honor his mother, they decided that a school in an inner city would be appropriate.

“That’s where the need seems to be the greatest,” he said. “We felt the funds that we would donate could do the most good there. We began to research the various charter schools and Alliance was just amazing.”

Alliance College-Ready Public Schools operates 27 schools with 12,000 students in Los Angeles. It says that 95 percent of its graduates are accepted into college.

David Shaheen said the school is near the Los Angeles community of Watts and the city of Compton, two areas with high poverty rates.

“The reason why they decided to put a health services academy here is that there are no health services in this particular area, no doctors’ offices, no clinics, no hospitals,” he said. “And statistics show that if you train students in health services in their early years, they will go on to study that in college and bring it back to their communities.”

David Shaheen said his mother’s very first job in the United States was as a medical technician in a hospital laboratory.

“So there’s a connection there that we think is important,” he said.

The area also has a large population of immigrants and first-generation Americans.

“My mother was born in the United States. But she was raised in Italy, and her first language was Italian,” he said. “She and my father (who was also a first-generation American) started a company and built it into something significant. We think that her story will really resonate with the 600 students who will go through there every year.”