Hiding scary things from kids

Deborah Hale, founder and director of the Inside Outside School, kindly granted Alt Ed Austin permission to republish this timely and soul-searching piece. It originally appeared on her school blog earlier this month, soon after large protests against police brutality and racism began in Minneapolis, Austin, and many other communities throughout the world.

 
Recent events following the murder of George Floyd have offered me, a white woman born in the 1950s, an opportunity for self-reflection. I am not doing a good enough job of growing anti-racist children. I’ve always taken the approach with environmental education that we don’t focus on what is wrong like glaciers melting; instead we help children fall in love with nature, so that one day they will harness that love in a way that actively protects the environment. Playing in a creek, gardening, and feeding chickens are our methodology of raising an environmental activist.  We address race issues mostly through literature. We teach respect for everyone. The students study the Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow laws, slavery, the Underground Railroad, segregation, and prejudice. 
​ 
In her book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness, Anastasia Higginbotham shows a mother saying, “Oh no, not again.” Her daughter hears her and says, “Mom. What ‘not again?’” The mother doesn’t want to tell her child about the George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Mark Ramos news break of the day. She wants to “hide scary things” from her kid. Boy, do I get that! I really want children to enjoy their sacred childhood, running, playing, laughing. The dangers they face at school are poison ivy, sharp rocks under their bare feet, snakes, and puss moth caterpillars. Their parents might worry about that a bit, but they don’t have to worry that their child will be murdered by police. I can protect them from the horrible, frightening details in today’s news, but because there is not a lot of diversity, I cannot help them fall in love with people of color through direct experience. Our school isn’t free, there is no free breakfast or lunch, we are not on a bus route. We lack socio-economic diversity. As a private school, we serve privileged children. That’s not what I want, but that is what I created.

Our family has recently had our own run-in with racist police brutality. Like many white grandparents, we have grandchildren, daughters-in-law, nieces, and nephews who are people of color. Our grandson was peacefully protesting in Austin and was shot at close range by a police officer’s rubber bullet.

Our grandson, now 20, is a photographer. The bullet hit his right arm. He required emergency surgery to save his arm. He has a huge scar which runs down the center of his Texas tattoo. He was holding a camera, not a gun. 

He is a peaceful man. He eats a vegan diet so that he may do no harm. I adore my grandchildren. They matter to me deeply and personally. Our grandson recently shared with us how difficult it has been for him, growing up black. I heard his pain, the things he has faced that our other grandchildren will never have to face because they are white. I do want them to know what happened to their cousin. I know it is a scary thing, but knowing about this is important. We cannot let them grow up thinking that the color of your skin doesn’t matter. It makes all the difference if your skin color isn’t white. I knelt in the grass on a recent Sunday at Huston-Tillotson College listening to the heartbreaking words of Brenda Ramos, whose son, Mark, had been killed by police in Austin 6 weeks earlier. Mark was unarmed and had his hands up in the air.  There has been no justice, no arrest. My heart is hurting for her and for all mothers and grandmothers whose children are people of color.

One of the reasons we don’t teach our students at IOS about deforestation and climate change is that these big problems can paralyze children into a fear that they can only shut down around. I feel this paralyzing fear about our world right now. Are we facing civil war? Are people trying to stir up such an unimaginable evil in the year 2020? I cannot remain frozen in fear. I have to use my voice to speak out against racism. It was not my idea, and if you are reading this, it was not yours either. We do not support it, but are we fighting it?

My grandfather introduced racism into our home when I was in kindergarten or first grade. He said the N word at the dinner table in reference to his co-workers at the post office. My mother bravely ripped her father in law a new one in front of his granddaughters. It made an indelible impression on me. I thank God that my mother shaped my belief system, not my grandfather. When we saw the race riots on the television, she did not send me out of the room. I saw. I see. I cannot look the other way.

Our next module in our Wit and Wisdom curriculum at the Inside Outside School is “Civil Rights.” We will open with this integrated theme in our pandemic world classroom, whatever that looks like. I will help shape the belief systems of my students. I will continue to teach them the Three Respect Agreements of our school: Respect Yourself, Respect Others, Respect the Environment. I will continue to teach them about a growth mindset and about the Dimensions of Human Greatness. But, when we talk about interaction, I want them to actually have interactions with people of color. I don’t want it to all be book learning. 

My semester reports are all written, and now I am trying to plan for a world where students can’t be closer than 6 feet from each other, where I may be teaching with a mask over my mouth and nose in triple-digit Texas heat. But just as importantly, I also am imagining how to plan a world where the student population at our school reflects the diversity of our wider community. I can stand against racism by not being satisfied with my white privilege. I can ask for the means to serve more intentionally in creating a more just and loving world. I can reach into the greater field of life where this school originated and find the next upgrade. Through our shared intention, let us see that manifesting. 

Please join me. Namaste.

Deborah Hale

#1 Tool for Pandemic Parenting

Today we’re excited to bring you some timely and practical parenting advice from a beloved figure in the Austin educational community, Sensei Jonathan Hewitt. As founder of Life Ki-do Martial Arts, Parenting & Life Education, Sensei Jonathan has worked with countless children, teens, and adults to cultivate inner peace, confidence, and happiness. In this guest post, he explains an exceptionally effective technique for navigating these difficult times as parents, educators, and caregivers.

“Pandemic Parenting” is not a term any of us ever expected to hear, let alone experience! Yet here we are.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the relentless daily details of managing kids AND school AND work AND home while ALSO feeling the greater stress that comes along with all the unknowns of a world pandemic, you’re not alone. It’s a lot for all of us.

The thing is that there’s no way to fix or manage everything in our lives in a way that ever feels 100 percent resolved, especially now during a pandemic.

So, the #1 tool not only to help yourself but also to help everyone around you is to manage yourself first. How often have we heard “Put your oxygen mask on before helping anyone else”? If we think about it, our natural parenting instinct would always be to help our kids before ourselves. Wouldn’t we be terrible parents if we thought about ourselves first? How could we even think about giving ourselves oxygen before our kids, who are so small and so vulnerable and unable to take care of themselves? It seems so counterintuitive to fight this natural protective instinct.

However, in these moments of intense survival, data shows that parents do need to give themselves oxygen first to stabilize themselves BEFORE they can be helpful to their kids.

The biggest objection I hear from parents is “When”?! When can I find time to take care of myself? Especially in our current world, when kids are home and you are juggling a million details and schedules and emotions 24/7. It’s hard.

So, my #1 Pandemic Parenting tip is called Continuous Breathing. The reason it’s my #1 tip right now is that you practice it WHILE doing your everyday activities.

The goal of Continuous Breathing is to regulate our own nervous system. While we can’t completely control our outer world, whether that’s in our own home or in this greater world pandemic, we actually do have a way to directly impact our own nervous system, which in turn can have a big influence on our surroundings.

I first learned about this from my world-renowned martial arts teacher, Vladimir Vasiliev. I figured that if he uses it successfully during full-on combat, it can also work for the triage we are doing in our own homes these days.

As you’ve probably experienced, when we are under stress, our breathing tends to be shallow and stuck. This puts our body and mind in survival, fight, flight, or freeze mode. Our bodies are hardwired to respond this way for moments of physical survival and emergency. But to be in this mode on a regular basis throughout the day creates havoc and chaos on our nervous system, which in turn feeds the havoc and chaos around us.

Continuous Breathing allows us to counterbalance the survival stressed-out mode by sending a powerful message to our nervous system to be calm, strong, and fluid. At Life Ki-do, we call this “being like a River.”

If you allow it, Continuous Breathing can become your own private coach and best friend reminding you to slow down, be present, and flow with your inner world and the world around you.

The good news is that our bodies automatically breathe for us to keep us alive. But we are not harnessing the great power the breath can really give us. We can be more than just alive. We can use the breath to really nurture our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. 

First, we need to become aware and conscious of our breath. It takes a shift of our awareness to really tune in and listen to the inhale and exhale that’s already happening. Can you feel the air going in your nose and out your nose or mouth? Can you hear the breath inside your head and feel it in your body?

Now that you are aware of your breath, the second step is to gently adjust it to nurture the River flow state in that moment. If you are feeling stress or tension, can you slow down your inhale and exhale to calm your nervous system? If you are feeling sluggish, can you speed it up to wake up and energize your system? If the rhythm of your breath feels right, then focus on that rhythmic inhale and exhale, and it will deepen the calm of your nervous system.

The best way to make Continuous Breathing part of your life is to attach it to a habit already in your routine. Taking a shower is a great example. While showering, try to focus on your Continuous Breathing. Notice your breath and gently adjust it by slowing it down, taking it deeper, or speeding it up to find your perfect rhythm for that moment. Feel your breath. Hear your breath.

The next step is to focus on Continuous Breathing during other daily activities. Maybe it’s emptying the dishwasher, taking the dog for a walk, folding laundry. Once you’ve developed a practice during everyday routines, it should be easier for you to access it during moments of greater stress and fatigue.

The best part is that the breath is ALWAYS there for you. It’s something you can really rely on. It can be a best friend who never lets you down. It can be an anchor that helps you to find flow and calm even in the storm. 

For a video on Continuous Breathing and for free Pandemic Parenting Workshops, please visit https://www.lifekido.com/pandemic-parenting.

Sensei Jonathan Hewitt | Life Ki-do Martial Arts, Parenting & Life Education

Talking with children about the coronavirus

Marie Catrett is a longtime early childhood teacher who has been contributing her shining light and insights to the Alt Ed Austin blog since 2012. She uses daily documentation to record children’s learning, support children’s interests, teach with intention, connect families to the journey, and share her work with other folks who might be interested in a playful, creative, and expressive early childhood experience. You can find more of Marie’s writings on her own blog, Guidance for Grownups.


This class has a tradition of beginning with a time for the children to share joys and concerns. They call this their “roses and thorns.” Children share about being very proud about tying their own shoes for the first time, excitement for an upcoming Frozen 2 birthday party, the sad news of a neighbor’s dog who died. After the children’s shares I say I have a thorn to say about because I am thinking about the coronavirus.

I give a long pause. Everyone is listening now. Really listening, the kind of listening you do when someone names out loud a heavy thing that you too are carrying. We don’t have to hold hard things all alone.

It is early days here in our community. As I write this, we have no confirmed cases yet, but it is everywhere in the news. Kids hear things. They read our worried faces. In my years of talking with children about hard topics they  always know when something is up. Just talking about getting the regular kind of sick is important because young children need to see that they get better!

My strategy here is to let all the children speak first, and then I take my turn.

Marie: I wanted to make a time for us today to talk about the coronavirus and anybody who wants to share about it, we’d love to hear your words. I have some thoughts to share with you, too.

—-I actually have way more happy things.

Marie: Well, we can definitely make time to hear more about happy things too. I know it can be hard to talk about big things sometimes.

—And I’m getting strong!

Marie: I’m so glad. And I think it can be so good to have time to talk about worries. Did anybody want to say about coronavirus?

—I know that it is going around the world.

Marie: Mmm, anybody else hear about that?

—The coronavirus is at the front of my school. At the doors. And at the front. And on the handles. Maybe you have to go to a new school on a bus.

Marie: You’re saying you are worried about your school.

—Yeah.

—The coronavirus is bad for you.

Marie: Has anybody else heard about that?

—It’s kind of killing people a little bit.

Marie: Yeah, hearing that sounds pretty scary.

—Yeah!

—I heard that on cruise ships that more than one person had the coronavirus. And some people were starting to die and there was like an old man and an old woman and they didn’t have it but the doctors on the cruise ship were trying to keep them as healthy as possible. So they wouldn’t get it.

Marie: Mmhmm, that is so important, and this has been in the news, hasn’t it? A lot of talking about it.

—Yeah, and you have to wash your hands. For at least twenty seconds!

Marie: Yeah. So, some of this is a lot like the flu. Do you know about the flu?

Kids: Yes!

Marie: Have you ever gotten sick with something like the flu? Your tummy doesn’t feel good, you have a fever, maybe you throw up.

—My brother had the flu.

—I got the flu one day and then I throwed up in my bed!

Marie: Oh, yes, and I remember you talked about that before. And how are you feeling now? Do you have the flu now? Do you feel sick now or are you feeling better?

—I’m kind of feeling sick now because my sister put a toy car in my mouth!

Marie: Ah, that happened, and you didn’t like it. You didn’t feel good about it.

—I throw up in my mouth. Sometimes.

Marie: We all get sick sometimes, don’t we?

—But I never got the flu!

—Well my brother did throw up one time. My brother threw up all over the car!
Marie: Oh yes, well that can happen. You sure notice when somebody is sick don’t you? Well, is your brother sick today or is he feeling better?

—He’s not even sick.

Marie: Okay good, he’s feeling better. Yes, so, our bodies are so good at getting better. Most almost all the time when you get sick you get better.

—Except when you get the coronavirus.

—Sometimes it gets better?

—Maybe just for a few days you’ll be sick with it and then it’ll be gone.

Marie: You know some important things about this virus. Okay, here are some things I want to say about it. The coronavirus is a kind of being sick. It’s like, have you ever had a bad cold where you sneeze a lot and you might have a fever?

—Once I had a little cold!

—I had a cold one time. Every time my eyes get itchy! And my nose!
Marie: So, having a cold sometimes, getting sick sometimes, that is so normal. That happens to all of us. You get sick, you rest, your grownups take care of you. And maybe you need some medicine from a doctor to help your body get better.

—I had some medicine and it was bubble gum flavor.

—I have cherry medicine. It smells like my grandma.

—And medicine for allergies. Allergy medicine to help my eyes stop itching.

Marie: Yeah, we have so many ways to help people get better. What I wanted to say—what I want everybody to hear—with the coronavirus, people are getting sick from it. Almost all of those people are getting better and it is like having a bad cold. For some people—for people that are very old and very sick—they might have a harder time getting better from it and they might need to get more help from a doctor and going to the hospital. And some of those very very sick people, they could die from it. But for kids, and people that are healthy, which is most all of us, most of the time, for those people that get the coronavirus, it is like having a bad cold. And mostly you get better. But it’s not very fun to be sick. Right?

—No.

Marie: You rest a lot.

—But you also don’t get to go to school!

Marie: Yes, if you get sick you should stay home and not go to school.

—And you have to not be sick for one whole day before you go back to school.

—I have a doctor at my school, but all of the teachers and students call it going to the nurse.

Marie: Doctors and nurses know so much about helping people feel better. They are experts at helping us.

—If you didn’t have doctors and nurses you could die! Because you are very very sick.

Marie: We are so lucky, if someone we know gets very sick, we have doctors and nurses that can help. They have many good tools to help people get better. And if you are feeling worried about getting sick, or someone you know getting sick, because really nobody likes to be sick—

—Except when you get to stay home from school.

Marie (laughing) You don’t like to get sick, but you do like to get to stay home from school, are those your thoughts about it?

—Yeah.

—I stay home from school alllllll the time and then I play My Little Pony.

Marie: In my house we call that getting to have a hooky day. Sometimes even when you aren’t sick but you just feel like you need to have a day where you don’t have to do all the things you have to do and you just wanna play a video game and My Little Pony and wear pajamas all day and take a nap . . .

—I once did that!

—And my mom says get dressed, and I wouldn’t!

Marie: Oh, my goodness. Well, what I want to say is that if you are feeling worried about the coronavirus, please tell a grownup that you are feeling worried. So you can talk about it. So they can listen to you and think about it with you and listen to your questions. Because our job as your grownups is to think about how to help keep people safe and healthy, and so many grownups—especially doctors and scientists—are working really hard to figure out how to help people all over the whole world. Which is really good news. That is so many people coming together to make this better. Hooray for science!

—My mom is trying to be a nurse or a doctor.

Marie: Oh, that is really wonderful and exciting. We need grownups that care about helping people get better, like doctors and nurses, and like your mom.


Note: In reviewing our conversation I see that we did not address the xenophobia and racism that is accompanying people’s responses to this virus. Those are important topics to hit on in follow-up conversations for the group. 

Additional resources:

After our group conversation, I told a handwashing story using a felt board I put together, inspired by the Two Little Hands Felt Story, followed by actual handwashing by all the children. So many birthday parties at the sink today!

Each child took home the printable book NPR has put together: Exploring the New Coronavirus: A Comic Just for Kids.

Marie Catrett

Something there is that doesn't love a wall

Guest contributor Laurie Filipelli is on a mission to help writers of all ages transform their experiences into meaningful poems and personal narratives—and mightily crafted college application essays. She holds an M.F.A in Poetry and an M.A. in English and has taught high school, college, and pedagogical courses. Laurie is the author of two books of poems—Girl Paper Stone (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) and Elseplace (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013)—as well as the Mighty Writing College Application Essay Guide, in collaboration with Irena Smith, Ph.D. Her weeklong Kids with Pens poetry summer camp will take place July 20–24 and is now open for registration.

It’s happened to most of us at one time or another: you return to a cherished place after an absence—maybe a weekend, maybe years—and you find something irrevocably changed. The place no longer feels like the place you knew; a line is drawn between before and after.

After winter break, my daughter and I went back to her school and found a new chain-link fence. Given the age in which we live, this is not a surprise. People want to feel safer, and this feeling, some psychologists (and fence makers) tell us, is achieved with a strong perimeter. If we know our boundaries, we can flourish. 

As a poet, it is hard to believe this is true. Our writing may benefit from the limits of form, but it is the breaking of barriers that gives words life. We use repetition so we can augment variation. We limit our imagistic palette so that the brightest colors shine through. The impositions of an artist are self-imposed, not stifling. The most meaningful work requires not safety, but risk.

My daughter and her friend walked along the fence, gathering old balls, lots of sticks, and a busted pick-up/drop-off sign. Near the soccer goal, they erected a shrine, topping it off with a placard of painted wood on which they wrote a dedication to a time “before the fence.”

Weeks later on the playground, I couldn’t help but quote Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall” to a friend, not the oft misused part about good fences and good neighbors, but the part that sums up the steady work of nature in the face of artificial boundaries. Something there is that doesn't love a wall. The shrine by now had long been disassembled (the placard, serendipitously, found a home on a loving parent’s Twitter feed), but the fence itself was adorned with muddied sweatshirts. I watched with pleasure as a kid who’d mastered the art of tree climbing attempted to hurl himself over.

In our fenced-in world, it takes effort to make mischief, and imagination to move beyond our fears and longings for the past. We can’t remove most fences, but we can ask ourselves, as Frost asks in his poem, what “we’re walling in and walling out.” We can chip away at boundaries in our own minds, and, with some effort, even learn to climb.


Laurie Filipelli

Austin's Abrome joins Flying Squads as a collaborator

We are pleased to republish this thought-provoking piece by Antonio Buehler, which originally appeared on the Flying Squads blog. Antonio is, among other things, a co-founder, adult learner, and facilitator at Abrome.

Abrome is a Self-Directed Education (SDE) community in Austin, Texas, that is now in its fourth year. As Facilitators (adult staff members), we regularly critique our approach to interacting with Learners and building community, as well as how the culture of Abrome is evolving. It was through this process, for example, that we recognized the benefits of working more closely with Agile Learning Centers. Attending their trainings and bringing some of their tools and practices into our community helped us improve our skills as Facilitators and enabled us to better cultivate and protect an inclusive, non-oppressive culture that was building within our growing community. 

However, we still face a variety of challenges that many other Self-Directed Education communities struggle with. For example, accessibility will always be a challenge due to an absence of public funding. We also have limited diversity (e.g., race, nationality, religion) in a society that insists that only those with privilege can risk opting out of oppressive systems. And of course, our so-called radical belief that young people should be treated as people and not coerced for their own good is just a bridge too far for most families. Another challenge that we had not previously considered was that Abrome Learners were not in the world in the ways that free people should be able to be in the world. 

What we saw as freedom to do whatever the Learners wanted to do at Abrome, we eventually realized was freedom that was severely restricted by time and place. Abrome is not in the urban center of Austin, and public transportation does not extend to our neighborhood (intentionally so, unfortunately, thanks to lawmakers). Our Learners cannot easily walk to a library, museums, or busy intersections where people from all segments of society come into contact with one another. And even though we frequently organized outings to go to the library, visit museums, or go into the city for any other reason, we were doing so with a destination and goal in mind that resulted in time-restricted outings—we did not allocate time for exploration, evolving interests, or emergent possibilities. So while they are free at Abrome in ways that schooled children are not, Abrome Learners were still missing out on leveraging that freedom in ways that would allow them to better develop their understanding of themselves as members of a broader society and as individuals who could influence that society. 

We decided that we would experiment with an unstructured day in the city that would give them the opportunity to assert their right to exist as full people in a city that does not fully honor young people, and allow their day to unfold in ways that were not limited by the Facilitators’ feelings of needing to transport the Learners back to our physical home base. 

I wrote the following letter to parents October 6, 2019:

While we love our planned outings we recognize that they have been limiting to the Learners because we typically have a goal to go somewhere and do something specific and time bounded, and then when it is over we come back to Abrome. We are concerned that the Learners are not being given the opportunity to simply exist in the city where they can allow their plans to evolve emergently based on the combined interests of the group. Further, we want to continually push back against the notion that learning is confined to any given space, that learning objectives must be clearly defined, or that children and adolescents should not exist in public spaces during the day. We brought this up as an awareness at Friday’s Check-in and Change-up and we decided that we would experiment with an unstructured full-day outing in Austin on Thursday. The idea is that we go into or meet at a location in Austin, and then check in with the Learners and Facilitators to see how they want to collectively spend their time that day. . . . If this practice goes well we anticipate doing this once per week.

Jennifer was the Facilitator who joined four adolescent Learners on that first “Get Lost Day,” and it went fabulously well. We decided as a community that we would continue with our Get Lost Days, which have been a wonderful change of pace for older and younger Learners. These days have stretched us in terms of finding consensus and building community outside of our physical space and away from the tools that we regularly use at our physical home base. 

Soon after starting our Get Lost Days, we learned about Flying Squads. Similar to our experience finding Agile Learning Centers, we found that our beliefs and intentions lined up very well with what Flying Squads was doing. I was particularly moved by this statement on their homepage:

Even in the most caring of school and homeschooling coop spaces, a definitive line is drawn on where children learn and what space and materials are and are not for them. By intentionally not using a learning space or having predetermined tools and materials, Flying Squad participants learn the important value of abolishing these distinctions as the young people involved interact with the world outside on a regular basis, carving out a space for themselves in their city. And as they do so, they learn perhaps one of life’s most important lessons: how to find self-identity while caring for and developing a community with others.

An added bonus was that I already knew Alex (Brooklyn) and Bria (Portland) from their work advocating for children and Self-Directed Education, and I respected them greatly. After jumping on a call with them and discussing it with the other Abrome Facilitators, we decided that we would use Abrome as a vehicle for growing Flying Squads as the next step to extending greater freedom to participating young people, and in turn, helping to move society so that it begins to tolerate (and eventually embrace) free young people as full members of that society. Like the other projects, Austin Flying Squads will be operating two days per week, with one day more focused on learning through play, and the other day more focused on social justice and youth rights. We are excited to collaborate with the other Flying Squads, and we will be sharing some of our experiences and observations on the Flying Squads blog.

Taking up space is a political act

Navigating the city

Younger Learners searching nooks and crannies at a local bookstore

Antonio Buehler

Happy Birthday, Clearview!

Guest contributor Bruce Smith is a staff member at Austin’s Clearview Sudbury School. A former high school teacher with degrees in English, history, and education, Bruce co-founded the first Sudbury school in Illinois. He also staffed at Alpine Valley School in Colorado for fifteen years and is the founder and president of Friends of Sudbury Schooling. On the blog today he celebrates an important milestone in Clearview history.

Around here, people’s birthdays are kind of a big deal — especially when someone turns 10 (“Double digits!”). Well, when the school you brought into the world hits the same mark, that feels like a really big deal, too.

On November 9, 2009, Clearview Sudbury School opened with four students in two rooms rented from Genesis Presbyterian Church. Now, ten years later, 35 students enjoy nine rooms at the same location. That in itself speaks volumes for what we’ve learned about nurturing relationships and staying true to the Sudbury model of self-directed, democratic schooling. Thanks to our families and staff, as well as our friends at the church, we’re not only surviving but thriving.

Here are a few tidbits of what ten years have brought us:

• We’re the oldest existing/longest running Sudbury school in Texas.

• A total of 114 students have enrolled at Clearview, and we’ve employed ten staff members.

• One of our first-year students is still here, and nine current students have been enrolled at least six years.

• Tuition has gone up only $2,000 since 2009 (with minimum annual tuition now at $1,600), underscoring our commitment to making a Sudbury education as affordable as possible.

• We’ve brought internationally famous writer, researcher, and self-directed education advocate Peter Gray to Austin three times. (Good links to Peter’s work include his Psychology Today blog and his book Free to Learn.)

• Students and staff from more than half a dozen other Sudbury schools have visited Clearview.

• Clearview staff have attended Sudbury conferences in Massachusetts, Maryland, and New York.

• We’ve had five graduates in the past ten years.

To celebrate our big birthday this past November, we hosted an event with Jim Rietmulder, co-founder and staff since 1984 at The Circle School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 15th. Please check out the YouTube videos of Jim’s talk, and consider buying a copy of his great new book, When Kids Rule the School.

Whether it’s our regular potlucks, our annual family camping trip, or just the spontaneous fun, intense interactions and deep play of daily school life, there’s always lots going on at Clearview. But don’t just take our word for it — below you’ll find the perspective of a long-time teacher and administrator who visited us last Spring.

Happy 10th Birthday, Clearview Sudbury School!

Thank you for your invitation to visit Clearview. When we spoke about the Sudbury model several weeks ago, you really piqued my interest. From the vantage point of an educator/administrator in public education for nearly 25 years, I dove into the history and researched many stories, explanations, and testimonials on this educational framework. I must admit, I found it delightful to read about how children were free to learn at their own pace and investigate based on their own interests. However, I couldn’t wait to see it in action because I truly couldn’t imagine what children would do, if left on their own, to manage their time and learning experiences.

As I visited your campus, I saw exactly what I expected to see. Some children playing video games, some climbing trees, some reading, some doing art and writing, some visiting, some on computers, and some eating. I visited with one of the children who explained to me how she felt confident about knowing how to make good choices and how to respect others. I spoke with an adult on campus who attended a Sudbury school in California. Her story intrigued me as I listened to how she was able to navigate college and make solid decisions about her future.

Perhaps the most impressive part of my visit was listening in on the Judicial Committee. This was the moment I said, “I’m impressed!” There’s a huge push in public education to bring children to a place of higher-order thinking. Many programs and methods are used. Teachers are trained in techniques and design to promote deep thinking in their classrooms. What I saw in the Judicial Committee demonstrated so much more than a scripted or contrived lesson. Children were settling their personal disputes with authentic, natural consequences with little assistance from the adults on campus. The adults that were interjecting modeled perfectly how to carefully choose words for the written record and listened respectfully to children as they decided how best to maintain order in their school. The conversations were rich, vocabulary was robust, and social skills laced with respect and reasoning skills were at an all-time high.

The result of what children are experiencing at Clearview Sudbury School tells me what I wondered as I did my homework prior to my visit. While it may seem unconventional to some, it seems so natural to the children on campus. No one is testing to see if everyone is on track. Everyone feels supported. Best of all, these children have not been robbed of their curiosity by years of sitting in rows completing worksheets. I loved it!

I was pleasantly surprised to see what I saw at Clearview Sudbury School. Thank you for broadening my horizons!! Can’t wait to see what the future holds for your students and Clearview Sudbury School. Keep up the great work!!

Bruce Smith