Above the front entrance hangs a small wooden cross, symbolizing someone’s unity with God- certainly not ours. This is an immovable holdover from the previous occupants of the building, the Catholic Church we’re renting space from. In the current space, there aren’t any other such reminders gracing the walls, but I’ve heard that this is a new thing. The old building apparently had a large gold-streaked portrait of Jesus and a ‘count with angels’ number poster and alphabet. They were mandatory wall fixtures, whether for official Church use or for our own good.
The door thing’s okay though. Our building is on the side of an ugly, busy street and there is a too-official looking fire exit right on the side of this road that everyone tries to use at least once before being yelled at by whatever staff member catches you. My first day started this way and so did a lot of my peers’. So if you’re lucky enough to already be in the loop about our school, you won’t be confronted with a cross on your first visit because you’ll have come in the right door. By the time everyone else knows to use the actual front entrance, they’ll already know that we have nothing to do with that little blessing.
The people running the church are nice and understanding of our situation, being a school with sporadic financial trouble. The board of directors say that we’re current in our payments to them, but I just don’t buy that. I feel like we should owe them thousands in in uncollected rent after watching the VFS‘s budget over the past three years. It’s probably just plain robbery, but I won’t say anything.
The building itself has some issues. The paint is chipping. The oven doesn’t work. The basement smells like, well, old basement. The circuits blow if you have the radio, the water boiler, and the toaster oven plugged in at the same time. One Monday we were attempting to make a simple brunch of bagels and toast when we were kicked out of the downstairs by a committee trying to set up something or other. We moved the operation upstairs, plugged in all of our necessary equipment and then watched an outlet spark and the whole room go dark. Someone was dispatched to flip the circuit breaker, and in the time it took them to walk back upstairs and enter the doorway, we had performed the same feat a second time. They went back and we decided as a room what appliances were the most important. Coffee, bagels and jazz music were deemed the most necessary items for enjoying ourselves, and for the rest of the morning we sat in almost complete darkness, still in our group circle, very quietly while Louie Armstrong tooted out some notes to accompany our chewing and sipping.
Slightly more dangerous, the ceiling has a habit of falling in on us. Anyone who’s spent time in an older building is familiar with that ominous creaking and small snapping sounds that come from walking on the floors above ground level. I always thought that us kids would make the main floor fall in on the basement, and that there would be irreparable damage, either to the building that we don’t own or to someone’s life. There are no rules against running, jumping, having dance contests, throwing tantrums, or hurling hundred-pound objects onto the floor in our building, so guess what we do? The only rule along those lines is that there are no ‘wheels’ allowed inside, except for those Heely shoes that were voted acceptable by ASM a few years ago. By the time the teenage boys had outfitted their skateboards with rubber wheel-shaped pegs that allow for performing skate tricks inside, I thought for sure an earthquake-style implosion was going to happen any day. Whenever they would “skate” in the old Room C and I could hear the Room A class below us innocently having percussion class in the music room, I would beg the boys to stop, stop, stop, before disaster struck.
Imagine my surprise when a year later, it finally did, but in a most unexpected way. I was in the arts studio and a student exited the room, pulling the door shut behind them. A second later there was a deafening crash from the opposite corner. I turned to see six square feet of school-grade ceiling tile come crashing down onto the desk that thankfully, held no students. I was amazed that some mundane activity like shutting a door had done us in, and on the roof where no kid could have jumped down to cause a collapse. The arts studio was closed for a couple of weeks while the room was repaired, and for the next month everyone was really careful about shutting doors with a feather’s touch when they were gearing up for their synchronized jumping jack tournaments.
Despite some structural flaws, I’ve heard that this set-up is much, much better than the previous arrangement. The church allowed us to move up in building size during our fourth year of existence when the number of kids we had exceeded the amount of square feet they were on. They had crammed the roughly thirty kids into a two room setup, with only a small closet serving as an office. No homerooms, no libraries, labs, or art rooms which every school should have, no real organization. I can see how this was appealing at first to a fledgling democratic school where the ideal is to have an un-segregated student body and a cohesive mix of ages and activities. In real life though, teenagers, ten year olds, and kindergarteners just don’t belong in the same room every day of the school year. I’m glad I never saw this old set-up considering my biggest problem is my fellow students being in my face. That might have turned me right off.
So these past groups of students managed not to personally tear the school to the ground, but the new batch are looking to succeed where others failed. We had a life skills class this past year in Room C that was a huge hit. It was the only class being offered at the time that had a pass/fail requirement stamped on it with certain projects to complete in order to stay the course. Along with many other cool challenges, each student was asked to learn or become comfortable with a practical life skill every week, like cooking a family dinner from scratch or filling out a job application. We all got to pick what skill we wanted to do and then share back with the group on our progress if we weren’t done. Two tweenagers explained how, as a joint venture, they were going to repair a hole in a wall that week. They reported that neither of them had any prior experience with this, but they had looked up exactly how to do it and had acquired the appropriate supplies. “Well great, boys! So where is the hole that you’re going to repair?” gushed our teacher. She was so proud of them. The boys beamed back. Very practically, one explained “We’ve got that covered.” “Yeah,” his friend added, “we’re about to make it.” He held up a long wooden pole with a slightly sharpened end.
* * *
Surprisingly, it’s a trend amongst alternative schools to rent space from churches. We all have limited money and they have extra space that they won’t charge an arm and a leg for. I spoke with people from other free schools and they also had rented space from various religious worshipping centers before being able to buy their own spot of land.
The coolest school building I’ve seen so far has belonged to the Brooklyn Free School. They managed to buy their own five story brown-stone right in the middle of Brooklyn, New York, and it is the most amazing set-up. I went to stay in New York City last year and got to visit this wonderful place. Each floor is designed for a different age group, with the bottom level serving as a lunch area and rec room. The higher you climb, the older the ages are until you reach the very top floor where they’ve tucked in a lovely, fully stocked library with a view of the neighborhood. I guess the reward for climbing all the way up there is to have silence. Despite this being an actual residential building with just a lot of average sized rooms, they’ve created: a rumpus room, with netting on the walls and bars on the windows; two art rooms, for bigger and smaller kids; a library, as I’ve mentioned; a kitchen down on the bottom floor; and an office space. That’s along with the many other rooms (many more than we have) for various purposes and classroom uses. It felt a little like The Burrow out of Harry Potter, the way it twisted up and up with new surprises at every level. And because free schools always feel slightly claustrophobic from the many little bodies whizzing past you, leaving their playthings all around, this rambling building felt smaller than it really was. In my mind, I remember it getting more compact as you reached the top, Eiffel Tower style, just from experiencing everything as you go.
Although, being an older building and having not just one, but five levels of free school hanging above your head made being in the downstairs a bit terrifying at times. There was so much more potential for a cave in that I found myself embarrassingly covering my head when something would crash three floors above.
The Brooklyn Free School was featured on by the NPR radio show, This American Life in 2011. The episode was all about when kids take charge from adults, and the host, Ira Glass, went to the school and reported on their unique democratic structure. He sounded slightly skeptical when describing the ASM he witnessed and the way the students interacted with one another. The funny thing was, the radio crew almost wasn’t allowed to come because they had to be voted acceptable by the students to be on campus. Ira was shocked by this, and I thought it was a beautiful example of the power that the student body really holds in democratic schools. We were all so happy at the VFS to hear of a kin free school getting national attention and excited that we actually knew people who were on ‘This American Life.’ Alternatively, we gritted our teeth over not having contacted the host back two years earlier when we had sent in a request to be featured. He said he was interested and that we should send in a video documenting ourselves for him to bring to committee and make a decision on our potential. Of course, we never did, and spent a while griping about not having a video camera and then not knowing how to work it and then not having the time. Damn our ability to get nothing done!
A free school with a more similar look is our good friends to the North, Windsor House School. Their public appointed building looks nice, not old and decrepit like most school buildings I’ve seen in my own district. When I visited their school recently, I was amazed at how similar they were to the VFS. Everything was basically the same, down to the days of the various meetings and the appearance of the population. There were just more of them, the students that is, and in a much nicer building. It has a few more classrooms than ours does (enough to have rooms just designated as ‘classroom’) and also has just one main hallway, like us.
They also have real things, seeing as they’re a public school. A library that’s an entire room crowded to the brim with real books. A high-quality gymnasium (unlike the wooden beamed one the Church lets us use) with actual sports equipment that came with it. There was a performance space with a backstage and lights and a curtain that wasn’t sewn together by a group of mothers one afternoon. But the most enviable thing: central heating. That’s right…They have central heating in EVERY room and it comes on every day ALL EXPENSES PAID! I know! The rule at our school is that, the shoddy heating system can be turned on as soon as you see your breath. Even then, you wait half an hour for it to warm up, it begins blowing out cold air after two hours of power, and you listen to our executive director grumbling about all of the money this is costing throughout the whole time. Then he tells us that to pay for it we’ll have to go home late on Christmas Eve and he’ll be freezing us to death in order to decrease the surplus population.
I also fancy their music room. I’m not sure if I’ve stated yet how much I detest our own one. Along with opening windows and performing indoor skate tricks, the teenage boys also loved to blast music from that large closet down in the basement. In the days when Room C was located right above this room, the electric guitars and bases and pianos and drums could not only be heard as if we were at a concert, but could be felt vibrating through our beings, straight through the floor. It was insane.
But at Windsor House, the music room is kept in their only portable outside of the school building. On the first day of my visit, my friend and I (also from the VFS) were excitedly shown around by another teenage girl who was one of the earlier risers at her school. We had arrived on campus just before the district bus arrived carrying most of the student body, which also ranged from ages 5 to 18. She agreed to give us a tour, and then, just in time to be the figurines in the exhibit, the school bus kids flooded the building. After their arrival, she became extra excited and giggly at the prospect of showing us the music room, which was located inside a portable about thirty feet away from a side entrance.
As soon as we stepped outside we could hear the thumping of a drum and the lower notes of some electric guitar spilling out into the nine o’clock sunshine. We walked inside the room and left the bright morning behind. It was cave-like in there and far, far too loud. Two teenage boys were pounding their hearts out on those instruments, making up for the past eighteen hours that they hadn’t been together in their rock-n’-roll den. This was not the most ideal way to start the day and my friend and I soon exited the room, leaving the girl behind to bob her head and listen attentively to the ear splitting ruckus. But the fact that the main school building couldn’t hear a note of this was a truly marvelous thing, something that our school should definitely learn from.
Windsor House School is forty years old and has always been a free school, but when things got financially hard a while back, they joined with the local school district to mixed reviews. The major change is that all high school aged students must receive at least four credits worth of classes a year, meaning that those students MUST take classes in order for Windsor House to receive funding. Yikes. And those classes have to be school-sanctioned, you know, like taught by certified teachers out of district approved textbooks and all that jazz. So you couldn’t just take “My Little Pony Playtime”, “Zombie Movie Madness”, “Basketball in the Gym,” and “Spiderman Appreciation Hour.” The biggest benefit of this arrangement is that these students also have the ability to get a real high school diploma if they want to go all out and take a full course load. I spoke with some of the students who were saying this was too much to ask of them, but I eagerly told them, “hey, at least you have the option!”
Windsor House is located in North Vancouver, B.C. (which is actually an entirely different city than just plain, old Vancouver) on the side of a large hill covered in wilderness. The suburb surrounds this entire area, but from a visitor’s perspective it’s hard to see where the forest starts and the town begins. It’s all kind of intermingled. That also means that they have the wild at their fingertips, literally at the end of their field area which morphs directly into the side of the hill and the trees.
So unlike in our part of the Pacific NW where we only have your typical Fire Drills and Earthquake Drills, they get to have annual Bear Drills. You know, just in case a nearby vicious animal wanders onto their field and tries to eat a small child. I didn’t get to see a Bear Drill in action so unfortunately I personally don’t know how to protect myself against a bear attack, but the idea itself provided endless amusement. I would look out across the field and just think that we were actually close enough to the Canadian outback that there was a real possibility of being accosted by a huge furry mammal while playing tag at school. Everyone there had bear stories to share about their own experience with those creatures all around the Vancouver area. It was kind of unfathomable. It just proved that I was in a foreign city. They didn’t have Bear Drills at the Brooklyn Free School. Canada should really move into the twenty-first century.
I feel like stressing that my own school does actually have all of the normal amenities of a ‘regular’ school- just different. I mention being jealous of some of the things that the other schools have, but that’s only because they strike my fancy more than others. Like, I’m totally willing to sacrifice Room B to put in a huge, fully stocked library. And then forcing all children under the age of fifteen into forced labor to build an actual stage and auditorium in the basement. I also wouldn’t object to selling all of Room A’s toys in order to buy an espresso machine for the café. Yeah. But I will point out that we’re the only school with a fully stocked science lab, complete with an actual-factual scientist manning the chemicals and equipment. Our art studio is always overflowing (in an organized way) with new supplies and fun donated items that inspire a lot of amazing projects. The kitchen downstairs, despite being slightly leaky and broken, is huge and can hold entire classes of kids. We have a rock wall, a composting system and bin, large school grade bathrooms, and before the financial crisis, we had a honkin’ big salt water aquarium downstairs with all sorts of fun things, like a seahorse and an octopus and every kind of brightly colored fish you could want. Hopefully we’ll get all of that back when our budget stabilizes.
Because the space isn’t ever quite what we want it to be, we play musical rooms every summer. Since moving into the new building, we’ve changed our classroom arrangements before the start of each new school year in hopes of solving whatever new bout of problems came up during the last one. Usually it’s the staff deciding that the population of one room has outgrown the space or needs a more cozy atmosphere. One year Room C was moved across the building into a space described as “more cave like” by the staff. Unsurprisingly, we are the only room that no longer plays along in the annual event, having found the perfect space for us brooding teens. The last time around, the goal was to create a rumpus room from the large area that used to be called The Living Room. This was the designated quiet spot for parents to meet, classes to be held in peace, kids to calm down, and a spot to generally be mellow in ( not that it was always used for this of course, but I’ve gone in there plenty of times and spent perfectly quiet hours without a soul around.) Now, it’ll be a designated loud space to be even louder than usual in and “get out all of your energy, so that you can be calm in the homerooms.” So now we have the usual crazyness happening in thee homerooms and in the place where we used to be able to go to escape all of that.
Sharing the same campus as a church isn’t as remarkable as it could be. We see no pastors in robes, overzealous congregation members, or long bell solos calling us to prayer. Sometimes we get the somewhat lost older person who comes wandering through our doors. “I’m here for the service,” they say, or, “I’ve come to volunteer.” The person behind the desk in the office balks, “Well, okay…I don’t remember speaking to you on the phone. How did you hear about our school?” It takes both parties a few moments of confused staring and false starts to then realize that the gray haired woman with the rosary in her hand is looking for the church and not our own non-profit. It’s the cross above the door. We should really talk to them about that.
A few years back we made it in good with a city planner or developer or general politician that someone was introduced to at some event. We have a lot of random connections in our community that are always coming and going with the families themselves. People always show up at the next circle meeting bursting with the big news about who they recently met and how this relationship might benefit the school. That makes us sound like we go out into the community only to trick people into friendships with false pretenses. Not true. We’re just a lot of people who happen to know a lot of other people. And if those people can help us, then… So, okay.
This city person liked our school so much that he talked to us about a possible development in our area that would house a new space for our school. He showed us his plans to build a huge environmentally friendly building a few blocks away from our current location that would have everything we could want. It would be the new bees knees of the neighborhood that’s been thinking about gentrification for a while now and hasn’t quite made up it’s mind about whether to go through with it. All he needed was this proposition to pass in the next city vote and the building was as good as ours. Unfortunately, the proposition was to demolish a massive city park that’s been there since the neighborhood’s inception and is a local favorite amongst little league teams and even our own students, who go there to frolic. It’s probably a good thing it didn’t pass. Whatever.
It’s been really fun to visit free school’s in other parts of the country and to contemplate what it would be like to go to school in those cities. Having off campus permission in New York City where Manhattan is a thirty minute subway ride away would be pretty sweet. That’s how I felt about Portland during my first year of free school, mainly because I had never had that kind of freedom. “I don’t care if I can go to the library at any other time of the day! I want to go now!” Actually, back then I was really dissatisfied with my home town and told everyone I knew that I was moving to New York as soon as I possibly could. Portland was the dullest place I had ever been to and I honestly didn’t see how my parents weren’t also pulling their hair out and trying to run away as fast as they could. It only took a little while for the freedom effect to wear off and I soon exercised my off-campus privileges much less liberally.
Now, I’m mostly in a denying field-trips phase. Other children are always chomping at the bit to get out of the building and explore the city, but whenever possible adventures are suggested, I generally always pass. “Seeing a show downtown? No thanks, I did that yesterday.” “The Nickel Arcade? How old do you think I am?” “For the last time, I’m not going inner-tubing down the side of Mt. Hood and then getting hot cocoa in the lodge! Stop asking!” The field trips always do sound kind of amazing and if I didn’t get out of the house so much already, I probably would be game for a lot of them. Except all of the screaming kids go, too. That’s kind of a bummer. I’m imagining that the museums and the shows and the hikes would are a lot less enjoyable when you’re surrounded by half of my school. That just doesn’t do it for me. Instead, I hang out at school while almost everyone else leaves, which gives me the peace and quiet I need in order to get work done. Field trip days are usually my most productive by far.
The school itself is really close to one of the grossest streets in Portland, so local field trips are pretty much out. There’s a Fred Meyer’s right on that street that is pretty safe so long as you get in and out quickly and back onto our side of 82nd. I mean, the druggies in the area aren’t too bad, but most of them hang around the plasma center, conveniently located right next to the closest library so there are no trips there either. It’s usually better to just not leave the school grounds unless you’re on your way to a different neighborhood because between the men walking around with that jean-pocket limp, the prostitutes, and the clouds of orange toxic waste floating by (I’m surprised we weren’t evacuated that day, but the City of Portland wanted us indoors, not out) you soon realize you’re in a place you shouldn’t be spending time in anyway.
This is sad for some of the teens who are just starting to get their sea legs and go out a bit more on their own. I’d imagine they’d hang around the area and move on from there, but we’ve covered that issue. So they’re left to go straight into the city which is sometimes a big deal. Many studens are just learning how to bus on their own. I watch them staring at the Portland bussing website, as if by looking at it the long enough the information would be burned into their brains.
They were planning this bus trip across town and it was their first time going alone. The staff told them to call while on the bus and once they arrived at their destination. My parents arranged this rule for me during my first year at VFS and I hated it. It felt so patronizing to an independent girl like me, that I would purposefully do all of my trips before or after arriving on campus so that I wouldn’t officially be on school time, and therefore didn’t have to be embarrassed. These kids needed it though, and seemed slightly more anxious than the staff. With directions in hand and worried looks a plenty, they set off into Portland, never to be heard of again. That hour. They called an hour later, lost, and the staff helped them and it all worked out in the end. But, yeah.
One might be surprised that groups of teenagers can walk around during the day and not get stopped by police. My biggest concern when I was younger was always that I was going to get stopped and questioned about why I wasn’t in school. We didn’t have school ID’s during my first year so if we got stopped, our instructions were to have the cop call the school’s office number and speak to a staff member. Being afraid of any kind trouble, this idea horrified me and I was always on my toes when I saw an officer during any of my outings. I think this has only ever happened once or twice with our students. That’s why I was highly amazed when, years later, I visited the Brooklyn Free School and the police arrived on two separate occasions that morning to drop off loose children. I guess New York has a bit more of a street hooligan problem. I can’t imagine why.
There are a lot of amazing places in town that make me excited that we’re located here. I tell my friends about the trips we all take on school time and they all just roll their eyes, completely scoffing at the idea that any of this is real. “You’re school couldn’t really do that and call it a field trip. Really.” They’re just jealous that taking field trips in public school requires so much work that it’s never worth it anyway. Yes, some of our choices are odd, but our goal is to have fun. Why make everything academic and serious when we don’t have to? Along with all of the unusual places, we hit up some of the children’s top 10 for the city, you know, with museums and children’s theater and what not. The only nontraditional thing that I’ve seen any similarity between us and public school was a regular ol’ trip downtown just to hang out. Every once in a while we let our kids run loose amongst the food carts, stores and parks. I equate these kind of trips to the pit-stops my parents used to take on road-trips when I was a toddler. They would stop in a rest area and literally ’run me’, sending me around trees and made up obstacle courses to let out energy. We have to ‘run’ our students every once in a while.
“Oh, yeah. We do that sometimes. For no reason, right? Just to look at it?” I laughed when my boyfriend told me this. He lives in a suburb outside of Portland and is my first close friend ever to do so. I don’t know much about suburban life because of that and it was weird to think that all of these children are in the city so little that they need field trips to see it. I kind of assumed everyone drove into the city everyday for a little bit anyway just because. I would. But because of his hobbies and general awesomeness, he finds himself in the city quite a bit, so the thought of teachers from his school trucking him all the way downtown just to be a tourist was pretty amusing.
One more really great thing about being in Portland is the culture that’s already here. The words hippie, hipster, progressive, accepting, young, young at heart, green, organic, and biker friendly are thrown around a lot. It’s not hard for our school to fit in here like it might be in, let’s say, a small mid-western town. I’ve gotten a lot of enthusiastic if not interested responses to my school while explaining it which I know wouldn’t always be the case. Everyone generally has something nice to say about it, or how smart the idea of it is, or how much fun it would be, or something along the lines of “good for you for doing your own thing! You must be so smart.
I’m just happy that I don’t have to spend all of my time defending myself. The most proving-my-worth I have to do always takes place with my judging peers who are intimidated by how interesting free school sounds and then must bring it down by exposing its flaws. Jerks. It would just be hell to have to do this with all of the grown-ups in my life, people who I look up to and would hate to have think of me in a bad light. I’m sure a lot more of them do than let on, but maybe all of the progressiveness in the air and the organic ingredients in their lunch make them willing to hear me out and try to understand. Just the fact that the Catholic church in our down and out neighborhood is willing to accept us and put up with our shenanigans is a wonder. So, thank you, Portland.
No comments:
Post a Comment