How To Start You Own School

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By SALLI RASBERRY & ROBERT GREENWAY

Reprinted by permission from RASBERRY/$3.95 plus 50Q postage/
Freestone Publishing/440 Bohemian High way/Sebastopol, Calif. 95472.

"Getting started" means a few people come together.

For those not already in communities of fighters or farmers, the catalyst may be someone with a sudden conviction about a particularly bad local public school scene; or a graduate student reading Maslow or Holt and becoming inspired; a high school kid in trouble with the police, or fighting with a principal who has demanded that his hair be cut; some public school teachers meeting to share anguish; someone coming out of a particularly revealing acid trip.

Coming together is like a dance, like dogs coming together to sniff each other's vital private premises. Impressions are quickly formed—people's dress., what they bring to eat ("They're still into white sugar!"), whether they take an offered joint, how open and straight they are with their children.

Goals are raised: some want to protect or convey or expand an ideology or social cause; some simply want to add to an existing community; some have a heavy personal need, perhaps loneliness; some have an idea—a vision about what a learning environment could be; some simply can go no further than hating public schools. Some have all these goals.

It's terribly complicated—if you want to look at it that way. But mostly it's exciting and beautiful: sometimes a group with goals exploding outwards like their own growth rates. Every group has its unique mix, its balance, its "magic mood of harmony" waiting to be discovered. Some make it, some don't.

Here are some beginnings:

SCENE 1

A school forms in a university-urban area having a high concentration of radicals and Blacks. No one can say exactly how it started—probably someone at the local free university office. But 40 parents with 70 children from 4-14 show up for a meeting called to "explore starting a school where children can follow their own interests rather than a decadent establishment's interests."

No Black parents show (there is one Chinese family—an engineer who feels his children are not learning fast enough in the local school). The rest are about evenly divided between hip-yippies and hip-looking professionals and academians.

They decide to hold a series of picnic-like discussions to find out what they want. Thus begins a long series of forum-like debates with a huge range of views (one of which is that all such discussions are bull crap). But grass flows freely, people begin to know and trust each other, and small groupings, social and work, begin to emerge. The main division is between those who want "structure" and those who don't. Those who do are, by and l arge, those with straight jobs—and money—and they pull out after about a year of meetings and start their own school with two teachers, 20 kids (a strict maximum), teachers paid $400 per month plus a fixed budget for expenses for the school, total control of day-to-day teaching turned over to the teachers, all parents agreeing to meet with teachers twice a month for heavy discussions of everything, including intimate details of feelings about the children and each other.

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