I don’t know about other people, but I find that there are two predictable questions that come up during conversations about free schools. Well, the first one is a giveaway. Before I worked on correcting my lisp, I had this tendency to slightly sludge every word I said and blurt everything out at the speed of sound. My listeners found this an impossibly difficult combination and often had trouble with the more unusual things I liked to spill out. Like, the phrase “I go to a free school.” They would furrow their brow, lean slightly in for clarity and ask, “did you say pre-school?”
“No, no, no, no!” Lots of laughing. Lots of backtracking on my part and an embarrassed smile. That question used to always accompany my schooling description, although strangely enough, when I asked around at school not many other people reported having this same problem. It took me until this last year to realize it was my own fault. For a long time I assumed that everyone had that little mistake.
Even worse, I was driving around last year in an unfamiliar part of town and I had to do a double take when I saw the sign in front of a cute little cottage type building, welcoming me to “The Village Pre-School”. Godammit. It was adding insult to injury. Unfortunately, the vote for the school’s name to be changed had happened just a few months earlier and the books were closed for good on the matter. We will forever be The Village Free -‘did you say pre?’- no, Free School.
And for everyone, the second (or first) question will always, always, always be, “So…how can you get into college?” Even as I’ve gotten older and checked my pronunciation, this question has always come up, as sure as someone greeting you with ‘hello.’ Not a single person hasn’t gone right to asking that after pausing momentarily for the connection to form. I can now recognize the “Huh, that’s interesting. So no grades or mandatory classes. I don’t think colleges will let those students in. Let me ask about that,” look on people’s faces as they ponder this new information. Maybe if I started my description of the VFS with, “and I’ve taken a lot of really interesting classes!”, or, “the cool thing is we really learn how to be in community,” people wouldn’t be able to ride that thought train quite as quickly. I could fool them with some other nice tidbit before they caught on about how we actually work. Beginning with, “It’s a non-coercive democratic school where kids do what they want, when they want,” probably sets me up for immediate failure. Or maybe if I were ten and didn’t look like I was approaching that college-bound age, I might get asked that a lot less. After all, high school is only prep for college. Everyone knows that. (The same way that middle school is prep for high school, elementary school is prep for middle school, and kindergarten is prep for elementary school. That was a problem with the standardized model that I recognized early on, even before going alternative. You’re never allowed to be where you’re at because you’re always preparing for something else. That’s one more thing that having no grade levels and no testing allows for.)
Although, I feel like even if I were ten and even if I started with something completely different, people would still ask me that just to spite me. “I go to the Village Free School, and the students get to vote on every rule of the school.” “I go to The Village Free School, and love to play Sprout.” “I go to The Village Free School, and we eat cinnamon toast every morning!”
“Yes, but how does that prepare you for college? Colleges don’t like students who eat cinnamon toast.”
What I usually say to this ridiculously predictable question is, “wow, what a really good question!”
I then go on to explain the best situation one can encounter while applying to colleges with a free school background. Ideally you’re applying to a lower grade college, shall we say- somewhere that couldn’t be mistaken for Harvard or Yale. This ups your selling potential exponentially, as the lower down the ladder you go, the less likely they are to ask you for things like ‘a real transcript’ or ‘proof that you learned something’ (whatever that means). For all of us with dreams of scholarships to Ivy League Schools, we’ve all basically dug ourselves into a hole on that one. It sucks to know that there are some places that won’t admit us, but that’s what happens when you live on the fringes of education. Hypothetically, any student could get into a fancy school like that, if they tried from age six on. They would really have to know they wanted to go there and be working on taking classes and completing independent projects from day one. We’re not in an environment that naturally prepares us for these schools.
But the good news is there are a lot of colleges and universities that will accept us! And there are more of them every year! Sometimes the trick to getting into school after free school- and some people might not agree with this- is to apply as a home schooler. It’s a little lie that can save you a thousand heartaches of people reading ‘non-accredited high school’ and saying “I don’t think so; that’s too weird,” versus ‘non-accredited home schooler’ which gets you “Oh, tell me more.” As more and more colleges begin to accept homeschoolers and add special home school supplement packages to their applications, it makes much more sense to ride that wave than to try and swim on our own. We pretty much home school at school anyway (at least the fringes of home-schooling). It seems that everything they ask for on the home-schooling supplement would apply for us quite nicely. There are things like: ‘describe each class you’ve taken in detail with a simple performance summary’, ‘turn in a graded academic paper in addition to the essays’, ‘provide three extra SAT Subject Test scores’, etc. So I will have to ask my Room C advisor to grade an essay that I’ve yet to write, but that’s a tad easier than calling the school and saying “I don’t fit under any of your entrance categories. Can I still be admitted?”
Of course, the people who wouldn’t agree with this small subterfuge say it’s much better to have this painful conversation with the schools rather than lie. I know a fair amount of adults in my community would frown upon me applying as something other than what I am which I understand. It’s much better to be honest than lie, and it’s much nicer to get the free school name out there to colleges for future kids to benefit from. Unfortunately, that method would leave me in the dust while they currently haven’t heard of and won’t accept bizarre democratic school students. In twenty years, my hard work will pay off when at some board meeting they say “for the past twenty years we’ve been getting requests from these ‘free school’ students. Should we make up a form and enroll them?” And it’s really a shame that I’m not that good of a person as to allow my admittance to be jeopardized to help the bigger movement. Maybe you can talk some of my peers into that. They seem a bit more helpful.
After you figure out that you can actually get in if you tried, you try. You try hard. There’s usually a bunch of little things that you’re missing: an SAT Subject test here, a graded paper there. In the end, it probably only takes about an extra four hours of effort on a free schooler’s part per application than a standardized student. At that point, the colleges and universities are primed to accept you based on what you have to offer and not whether you’re an actual student.
One thing we can’t fudge is how much we’ve actually done, though. I always worry that I simply haven’t accomplished enough during my high school years to really be a contender in the application pool. I mean, if I haven’t taken any classes then even my ‘descriptive transcript’ will be empty. That, I can’t fake. And we really have no idea what other students in our age range are learning. We have the basic concept, but if we put that we’ve taken two science classes with our official science teacher at school (which would be a lot of work and some serious shit for us), colleges might think that’s completely inadequate for science credit.
I know that I don’t have the four years of English, and three years of math, and two years of language, and all of those mandatory classes under my belt. I just don’t. But in regular schooling terms, I have about five years of history and ten years of electives in my arsenal that have taught me more than I could have ever hoped for. Every student at my school is like that because we weren’t thinking about those silly requirements when we were doing exactly what we wanted for all of these years. Despite applying as an alternative student, this could be a damning circumstance that I can’t avoid.
Therefore, I overcompensate by working my ass off, especially as I’ve gotten closer to the Fall ‘12 application due date. On my own, I’ve been cramming in lessons on biology and physics and trigonometry and French and anything I might need and not have. I worked all summer long (when I wasn’t writing this) to absorb these things well enough to count them on my transcript. I try to apply myself as much as possible to the material at hand, since I have no scale except my conscience to judge whether or not I worked hard enough to count it as an actual class I took. With no tests or grades, it’s hard to know if I actually learned something from my work. I’ve tried writing questions weeks in advance and then quizzing myself, taking copious notes just for proof, printing tests and practice sheets from the internet to see if what I’ve learned matches up. Everything to try and show myself that I put effort in, got something out, and can count it towards my education.
As a side note, this is a major conversation happening in the alternative education community. It turns out that no one really has an answer for how to show that our students get something out of the education we’re providing. The best answer so far has been to create portfolios of every fun project and class taken from their first day onward. This might work well for future generations, but for those of us who haven’t been doing that since our first day, we feel kind of lost. How am I supposed to show that what I’ve done has been educational without test scores and grades marking my progress?
All I know is that the other teens in Room C don’t seem to be too concerned with this issue. A few have made some murmurings about this, but aren’t mirroring my full panic attack. Once again, I wish I had their serene approach to the future and what might befall me. This serenity surprises me with for life-long free schoolers who have never received a grade in their lives (whereas my mom is planning on sending along the grades from my first quarter of my freshman year of high school with my applications to prove, in fact, that I am a straight-A student.) They seem so freakin’ calm while contemplating all of the classes they haven’t taken and the boxes they haven’t checked off. Maybe they all secretly have been keeping a portfolio for the past twelve years and have an entire file cabinet full of proof that they’re hard workers. I would kill for that. So I obsess and work incredibly hard on projects that I really don’t have to (since I don’t have to do anything, everyone reminds me) just so that I can get into college.
Like our democratic process, another one of our big selling points is our “non-coercive atmosphere”. I only just learned what that term actually means a little while ago, so let me try my best at explaining it. We don’t force our students to do anything that they don’t truly want to. This really comes through in the way we run our open schedule of classes that anyone can participate in. There are no required classes that you must take in order to graduate from the VFS and there are no grade point averages to keep up or finals to pass. This, unfortunately, has created an opt-out nature to every activity offered to our students. It’s the norm to say “no, thanks,” to a class instead of, “sure, why not! It’s not like I have anything else going on this block.” When a friend doesn’t want to do something, all of their buddies decline too, and all of sudden everyone‘s sitting around watching videos on Youtube. I suppose it’s not that surprising that if you offer children the opportunity to play with their friends or sit through a biology class, playtime always wins.
The hope is that the natural need to learn will shine through for every student and that they will choose to engage with their education without too much adult interference. However, letting that come to life in practice is a hard thing to watch. It’s true that complete freedom does suit some students better than others, but everyone should be able to benefit from having a non-pressuring environment to explore their interests in. Our school so far has taken a firm stance on children having absolute control of their day and their activities. Obviously, other democratic and alternative schools have different ideas of how much freedom is a good thing. After all, no one can do whatever they want all the time in life. I can only report that I’ve blossomed without mandatory assignments. The only thing holding me back is trying to reconcile my own experience with the one standardized children are having in public school, which is just me getting in my own way. I can’t speak for my peers or what they’ve accomplished through complete self-control. They can’t even speak for themselves, since they’re all sitting in front of a computer screen. Ask us in a little bit.
This desire to ‘goof-off‘, although completely human, is sometimes attributed to a period of time each student goes through called “de-schooling.” That’s where the child has to adapt to their new freedom and unlearn all of the formalities and pressures of standardized schooling. This crucial process manifests itself in many ways, but most commonly through kids saying “You know what? I don’t have to do anything anymore, so I’m not gonna’,” and then they sit on their butts, so to speak, for the next year or two. Eventually passions or interests win over and you see them start taking classes or working on projects, but the initial blast of freedom comes as a system shock that gets worked out over a long period of time.
For me, this actually meant hitting the ground running. All of a sudden I was able to focus on whatever I wanted, so naturally my interests ran ten thousand miles a minute and I organized and performed in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, took a full load of bizarre and interesting classes, got myself an internship at a local theater, helped plan a teen trip to San Francisco, choreographed a musical at my dad’s school, and then promptly burned out half way through the following year. Once all of that energy was out of my system, I slowed my roll and took the occasional class or two, but mostly focused on shopping, musical theater, and boys. You know, the important things in life. I feel like I’m only hitting my true stride now in my third year and it’s a shame that it’s my last. I envy the kids who come in at ages eight, nine, and ten who can go through this process and then reap the rewards for many years to come.
If you’re not in de-schooling mode - and most of our students aren‘t by now- the freedom is seems too much and they can’t bring themselves to attend anything regularly. As I’ve said, we wish this wasn’t the case. An opt-in nature is born with the community as evidenced by other free schools with similar set-ups, but opposite scenarios. It will take many years of pure effort to reverse this trend.
Sadly, pure effort is the area that we sometimes fall short in (imagine that, in a school where we have an opt-out problem). Like I said, this nature comes with the community, and our parents are just as enthralled by the freedom as we are. I firmly believe that most of the parents just want to be adult free-schoolers themselves and not have to go to work or do anything outside of their interests. I base my thesis on the huge percentage of them randomly hanging around the building during school days, drinking tea and chatting with themselves. I know that non-traditional parents have non-traditional jobs, but I didn’t know that that many people didn’t need to go to work.
Every single person keeps this attitude of relaxation close to their hearts and projects get started and dropped on a constant basis. This is all a part of playing and exploring in life, I totally get that. But, we take it to a new level. I have a theory that free school attracts ‘ideas’ people- the ones who come up with the wonderfully creative and ingenious things in life but then have no motivation, capability, or desire to actually see anything come through. We should really just hire a whole team of “doing” people to take these ideas and run with them so that our core population can just sip beverages and watch idly by while things come to fruition.
This attitude is especially killer when it comes to fundraisers- the things we need to keep us alive. When those don’t work out due to lack of people signing up or showing up ready to go, we hit major financial stumbling blocks that are almost too big to recover from. A great example of this was last year’s Christmas tree sale. The first time we’ve ever tried this, the idea was to sell Christmas trees to the outside community to benefit our school. When no one passed out fliers, signed up to work the booth, advertised amongst their own friends or brought in supplies to make a good-enough looking sale, we were left with a field of pine trees and $400 in the hole. We didn’t have enough money to pay to have them trucked off so the trees stayed rotting in the field for months as a beautiful metaphor of our horrible work ethic.
Having an opt-out nature means that students don’t end up in many classes, meaning they avoid a lot of “textbook” learning, meaning that, despite our school beliefs to the contrary, they’re missing a lot of basic information, meaning that academically speaking, they’re rather slow.
Oops, I let the cat out of the bag. That’s the secret we’re not supposed to divulge about our school, but I wouldn’t be doing our story justice if I ignored this fact. Let me begin this by saying that I believe in my school’s idea that learning can happen anywhere, at any time and you don’t need a formal instructor with a textbook to give you good information. I really do. I believe that the basics can be gained through living life and being surrounded by other intelligent and influential people. But. I also believe that the basics beyond adding simple numbers, reading some words, and knowing that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, requires outside help. Not that you can’t learn it, but it takes a seeking out of this information to acquire which is something that standardized schooling forces upon kids to great results.
This used to bother me a lot, since I wanted to point to our students’ academic success as proof that we’re a good school. That was the only way I knew how to view education, coming out of standardized schooling. Now, I would say that the bulk of what our students learn deals with the way they interact with life. We promote socializing and team-work. We teach conflict resolution and how to follow your passions. We explore the world around us, igniting natural curiosity and interests, which can come in handy when students do take classes. Advanced math and history and science can all be learned at any point in life, whereas knowing how to meaningfully interact with your community is a skill that everyone should have before entering the world. It’s taken me a long time to see this in my own school, but now this is the first thing I point to when asked about what our students learn.
I know a lot of people in my school community agree with me (on both points) and this has been an ongoing discussion for many years, indeed in the entire alternative schooling world. At times, we’ve flirted with the idea of having a mandatory class or two, or a program that would cover all of this basic information, but nothing can ever be decided on. I think in our heart of hearts we all know that having something like this would go against our core beliefs and we just can’t do that, no matter how useful it might be for our students.
As my old best friend said at the beginning of my free school experience after I had accidentally slipped up in conversation: “Me go free school. Me no grammar good.”
I worry, the way I imagine some parents do, when I see teenagers who haven’t yet learned their fractions. I cringe when I see nine year olds who have yet to make their way through a single book. My heart goes out to these kids. But at the same time, it brings me so much joy and faith when I see that same nine year old reading chapter books within the year. Those same teenagers plop themselves down in a math class and apply their brain power to a skill they pick up within the week. That’s all very heartening, and miraculously, it always happens. I see the whole process like dropping yourself off of a cliff and trusting that at the bottom is a mile wide pile of pillows. We’ve yet to see a teenager who can’t read, or any child leave Room B without a basic education in math and science. I’m more surprised at this than anybody because I believe in alternative education, but still having a certain amount of it be required. I’m just so worried that it won’t happen on its own. That’s why it’s so great when I see them playing games all day, and yet somehow ending up with this quality educational experience. Truly, I’ve never seen anything more life-affirming than that. It gives me heart that I didn’t even know I had.
It just takes a while sometimes to create this mosaic of an education, with pieces falling into place and being collected slowly over the years. That’s why it’s so hard for our students to leave this system for the standardized one at any age above seven because they’ll be at incredibly different levels in every area from where the district would like them to be. Through the years, I’ve created friends at several free schools across the country and have befriended them on various social networking websites. I would see their posts and messages on such sites with painfully misspelled words and atrocious grammar, and feel slightly better that it wasn’t just my free school with unlearned masses. Then, slowly, over the years the messages stopped being so offensively misspelled. Nowadays, not a single previous offender speaks in such a way, giving me further proof that something, somehow, comes from un-schooling.
Unfortunately, part of believing that learning happens anywhere comes with applying that motto to yourself. I would love to have every student engaged in something academic all day long and not playing video games or watching Youtube videos or leaping over furniture, but I have to remember that they’re busy “learning.” I can’t infringe on their freedom to stop being loud jerks while I’m trying to read (in the designated study room, no less). I haven’t figured this one out yet, but somehow their being completely disruptive is not infringing on my freedom to study, but that’s always been the case. The staff members ask them to please stop, but what they -the staff- don’t understand is that the conversation (albeit quiet) happening two feet behind my head about penises and boobs is just as distracting as if they were screaming it.
It annoys the crap out of me that the kids being loud and manic get first priority over those who want to study. This is the one area that makes me think, well maybe I shouldn’t be here. Because of this constant noise, and everyone’s unwillingness to just create a silent study room or corner or crevice, I actually get very little done in the school building itself. A lot of my courses happen at home through textbooks I’ve borrowed or worksheets given out through tutors. I hate that I’ve been academically pushed out of my own school, so to speak, but them’s the facts. Classes still get first dibs to rooms throughout the day and can kick kids out if the teacher wants, but even then teachers are afraid to do this or claim it’s unnecessary while our neighbors make fake sex noises or discuss their favorite Spiderman movie. I envy the standardized schooling kids their silent libraries, and study halls, and forcibly quiet classrooms.
I also just envy them their library and study hall in general. We have huge facilities for our small population, but what comes with the building itself is pretty scarce. We have a commercial kitchen space, a barren cement stage, an office space, and many, many closets and half rooms that have been turned into music rooms, science labs, dress-up playrooms, an industrial arts studio, and a library. One the of the saddest things is that our library is a closet. Whenever I make fun of my boyfriend’s school for it’s pretentious attitude and carpeted hallways, he always retorts with, “your library is a closet,” and he wins. We’ve done an exceedingly good job though at providing lovely equipment, considering our extremely limited funds and reliance on donations.
This brings me to the issue of money. I’m not breaking the news to anyone when I say we have none. Absolutely none. Like, every year we have a major crisis over whether or not we can continue operating the next year or if we can even finish the current one. Of course, that’s what comes with being an alternative school on the fringes of the education spectrum. No district can fund you and the population you attract will most likely not be millionaires with extra cash to spend on sustaining a non-profit. Some free schools survive by raising their tuition every year, sometimes topping $15, 000.
Now we come to the point in the program where I talk about what my family is shelling out to send me to this ‘free’ school. Everyone always asks when they first hear the name, if the school is actually free considering they don’t know in what context we’re using that word. I always laugh and say “no, no, no,” thinking of how hard my parents work to make this possible for me.
The tuition for this past year was $5,000. Now. Okay.
We pride ourselves on having the lowest tuition of any private school in the state of Oregon. That being said, tuition isn’t cheap and it’s getting harder and harder for families to make it work. My family brings in a comfortable sum every year, but my mom still had to take on extra hours of work when I first enrolled. Every time a large appliance breaks in the house or our car makes a funny noise, my education gets put on the sacrificial chopping block until the whole thing blows over and my mom can forget that I’m draining her bank account with all of my hippie mumbo-jumbo. For the record, my dad couldn’t care less. But he’s also blissfully unaware of any thing concerning money. He’s one of those kinds of people.
This is a really steep price to pay for most people and I know we’re not the only ones who are finding it hard. This past year alone, we had a large number of students leave or switch to the open school program because they could no longer pay the tuition. We have a system set up to counteract this though, to try and avoid it from happening. We’ve tried to structure it so that if you can’t afford to pay the full deal, you can volunteer some and pay less, killing two birds with one stone. We call this the Earned Discount Program and about eighty percent of our families are on that. You get something like $1,500 off the year if you volunteer 15 hours a month in whatever way you want. I’m always amazed how many adults in the community can swing this considering that they must have jobs.
We’ve also tried over the years to set up scholarship programs and I honestly don’t know what the status is on that currently. At one point we were giving out a couple thousand dollars amongst ten families to help out, but I don’t know what happened to it after our financial meltdown this past winter. I do know that our Core Volunteer program made it through the crash and is still going strong. With this program, you basically work at the school, but you get the steepest tuition cut of them all. There are only three or four of these positions, and they make the school run.
Some free schools make it work by…not making it work. At least, not like everyone else does. I’ve seen and heard of programs that have cut deals with the neighboring school district to get funding by changing some of their core operating principles to match more with what public schooling wants. My favorite example is The Windsor House school. As I’ll explain, they’re a lot like us with the added bonus of being engulfed by a school district.
As a side note, there are other bizarre effects to selling half of your soul to a school district. Like you have to comply with all of their safety requirements, down to the ridiculously minute things that normal people would never inflict on their children. When I visited, I attempted to make a cup of tea and was told very seriously that I wasn’t allowed to pour my own boiling water. Being there as a visiting student was a pain in the butt from having to deal with all of the paperwork and the supervision. The school district had also just cracked down on the supervision rule that all students must be in eye sight of a staff member which, as anyone who’s been inside of a free school knows, is a physical impossibility. The district had sent in minions to walk around with clipboards every hour of the day, terrorizing - I mean, supervising kids and writing down any infractions they saw. It all vaguely resembled The Ministry of Magic sending in Umbridge to monitor Hogwarts.
Since our school doesn’t work within the rules and benefits of a school district, we survive from what we can get through tuition and donations. All of the truly creative and cool things in our school have been donated, making the mix of items lying around as eclectic as the people who bring them in. Our staff member who spent ten years as a scientist at Oregon Health and Sciences University provided us with a fully stocked science lab (that he still has complete control over and monitors for safety reasons, of course). A parent who works as a part time carpenter helped students build an industrial arts studio this past year. He also brought in a climbing wall, too, which so far hasn’t caused any fatal injuries but we’re holding our breath. Instruments, books, games, toys, textbooks, art material, furniture, including the amazing array of comfy couches that we lounge on instead of gross plastic chairs, have all been donated.
The biggest problem about not having any money is not being able to pay our staff anything decent. I mean, sure they get “paid”, but what’s $20,000 a year give or take, for all of the hard work they put in every single day? It’s not fair and the staff know it and the community knows it, but we’re not willing to do anything about the problem. Everyone’s accepting it as an unfortunate fact of life, but it’s getting to the point where I’d rather call a spade a spade. I once heard a staff member say that working at the VFS is like a donation: their loved ones support them almost entirely while they donate all of their time and energy into making this school happen. It’s one massive, collective donation from their families and we need to recognize their position here as just that. I’ve never heard it summed up so truthfully and I’m not doing this impassioned speech justice, but that’s what I’d wish everyone would remember as far as staff are concerned.
But when we can’t pay our rent, people start sitting up and taking notice. This last winter we had our biggest financial scare in the school’s history, one that simply freezing staff pay checks and doing an extra fundraising campaign couldn’t fix. After several failed fundraising schemes (I’m thinking Christmas trees) and a slump in people paying tuition on time, our school faced a massive problem: raise $15,000 in 90 days or face closure. Before we could jump into action though, we had to have our mandatory few days of meetings that mainly revolved around grief counseling. Our executive director gave speech after speech that went from sounding like a chiding but understanding parent to a boss letting someone go. If he could have fired us all from his school community, he would have, I’m sure. We were failures.
The day I heard the news, I thought that we were done. I wept silently in the back of the room during the emergency ASM that was called first thing in the morning the day after the bank notice came. Unlike the children in front of me crying over losing their friends and loving community, I sobbed for the loss of my high school education. I would never finish the graduation process that I was already waist deep in, would have nothing to show prospective colleges, and would wind up on the street. I should have never come to this dreadful alternative nest in the first place! I had thrown out my entire future with one bad decision! My tears were purely self-absorbed pity. People patted my back saying “it’s all right, we’ll get through this together,” and I cried into their shoulder repeating “woe is me,” and “what will I do?”
During the following school week tensions were relieved by an All School Temper Tantrum. Gathered in the meeting room for the fourth morning and the fifth emergency meeting in a row, everyone’s mood was scraping along at an all time low. So we threw an All School Temper Tantrum, where on the count of three, all forty people in the room (students, staff, and interns), broke out into wild, desperate sobs. It lasted a pre-determined sixty seconds and the group stopped abruptly at the sound of the stop-watch. People crawled up off the floor, fists and legs stopped pounding on the scratchy carpet, wails died down to an instant whimper. Not surprisingly, the mood lifted once most of our negative energy was expelled into the ground. I’m not sure all of my bad feelings were cured by that communal explosion, but I believe it was a symptom of the larger good. Being in a community that wants to empathize and pull through together makes dealing with any crisis easier.
After every speech was given and every angry parent had their chance to stand up and say authoritatively, as if the problem was brought on only by their peers, “we MUST do something!”, it was finally time to do something. And because we’re an incredibly resilient bunch and will defend our right to sit around all day to the end, we pulled together in an unprecedented way. Fundraisers were thought up and executed at a breakneck speed to make the 90 day cut-off. Some of us *cough, cough* had ideas that fell flat early on, but almost everyone had something to contribute in an actually helpful way. I was amazed. I was also asking around for parents in the community who might be willing to home school me and trying to figure out how much tuition was for two years at Portland Community College. See, I fight….when it’s for my benefit. But it all came together in the end and the school was saved. Again. And not for the last time either. After two months of solid anxiety and manic panic, the VFS was no closer to closing than it usually is on any given day, which is to say, still one bad check away from nailing the doors shut.
For having a school environment so focused on money issues, kids often forget that they have their own pool of money sitting at their fingertips just waiting to be decimated as well. I’m speaking of the ASM budget that the council tends not to touch with a ten-foot pole even in the worst of times. That’s a good two thousand dollars allotted at the beginning of each school year with all unused funds going back into the school’s budget in June. This money is to be used for all proposals asking to buy anything, so that we’re not endlessly draining the school’s bank account without thinking about it. Advisors generally ask for mundane gifts, such as new materials or books or art supplies. Students tend to ask for new bikes, or toys, or games, or whatever they so desire that week. Money for school dances or big events comes from here as well. I personally tend to vote down proposals for items that I find frivolous (one time a group of students built an exclusive ‘clubhouse’ for only their group and asked ASM to fund their snacks), but I also tend to forget that the money just sits there all year long. Only rarely do we remember that we even have access to it. So if no one else is using it…
This last year one of our new staff members called a Room C meeting to tell us, very seriously, that there was over $800 of unclaimed money at our disposal that would be donated within the week. She suggested a massive party. When no one made any move, she went to ASM instead and used part of that to buy the school a Slip N’ Slide. Exactly why we love her.
Maybe it’s just one more aversion that we have to spending money on unnecessary things. I mean, we all know exactly how hard it is to raise that money because every student has participated in some way in a fundraising campaign. We don’t hire anybody to come in and lead fundraising campaigns and it takes every person to pull it all off. We teach our students to fundraise young, too. I took an entire course on fundraising a couple of years back taught by our executive director. He showed us how to call previous donors, politely ask for money, and send out thank you letters. He was very serious about this, if you can imagine.
Like so many things, free schools share fundraising as a common thread. When visiting other schools, I always bring a nice chunk of change to give to my wonderful hosts. Recently though, I’ve discovered that to be in the alternative community means you have to play the give-give game with money. We all know that our schools are suffering from lack of funds. We all know who’s schools are worse off than others. Instead of accepting the money, they send it right back towards you for your school. Then, I’ve learned, you say, “No, no, no, you’re school needs it more.” To which they say, “No, no, give this to your school from mine.” Eventually you end up with a fairly even split of the money going to each of your schools, unless one school is undeniably better off than the other one at the time of the give-give game. It leaves me thinking, hey, I could have just bought myself a cute top and a fancy cup of coffee with this cash that was just denied so vigorously into acceptance. What the what?
· · ·
“Be the change you want to see in the world,” said Gandhi. At our core, I believe this phrase speaks for what we’re trying to do at the VFS. We don’t force our students to do the things that we don’t believe in. We don’t test them because we know that a snapshot of their academic knowledge only shows how they can memorize and perform under pressure. Not everyone can do that well. We also don’t give out grades because we don’t want our students to feel judged based upon how well they can maneuver inside an area of study. An A or a B or a C doesn’t tell you how much effort they’ve put in and how much they truly gained out of taking that class - striving to achieve that A can take away from learning and engaging with the material. If you’re only playing a game - the game of getting good grades- than that’s your activity. Your activity is no longer learning or comprehending.
Despite having such a solid founding philosophy, we’ve only had three official graduates in our six years.
In truth, a lot of kids just drift off. One day they just don’t show up and their family sends word that they’ve decided to try something else out. But what is there after free school? Standardized programs don’t want you and you’re too old to make progress anywhere else. A lot of teenagers end up in community college to make up for their lost high school years and presumably get jobs and become normally functioning people. I’ve also witnessed a handful drop out and continue to live with their incredibly supportive parents who are more than happy to let them be ‘free’ and sit at home smoking pot all day.
I hestitate to share this goal simply because I’m so convinced that I’m going to fail, but I dream of not attending community college after free school. Well, I realize as I’m typing that I’ve already taken a supplementary class this past year, but that’s not the point. Or is it? Actually, yes, that’s the point I’m making. We can’t make it through our time in free school without missing something that colleges deem important and that we have to go correct at a different institution.
To make the ‘getting out of Dodge’ process even more unbearably difficult for our alternative population, we’ve recently introduced *dah dah dah dah* The Graduation Process. This magical culmination process is what we have instead of a huge set of final exams or ending projects or whathaveyou. The VFS graduation process is based on a combination of other free schools’ culminating processes that they spent years perfecting and then we threw together into our own original mash-up. The consensus in the community was that we needed something for our students to show everyone what they’ve accomplished in their time here, instead of throwing them out into the world without any kind of recognition. Enter a few unsuspecting guinea pig students, and tah-dah! The Graduation Process was officially implemented in the 2010-11 school year.
The idea is that the student shows how much they’re grown as a person and that they have the skills to enter the adult community, rather than test their academic abilities. There are four challenges: self-reliance, self-knowledge, community service, and professional. Each student designs their own “challenges” with the help of a committee of students, staff, and whoever else they want. They plan how much time they want to spend working on the process (usually a year to two years), and they map out plans for each of the four parts before beginning work. At the end, and after much blood, sweat and tears, they write four final essays summing up their experience and present their work to the community on the night of the actual graduation. It’s kind of sweet, really.
When kids design these projects, they’re looking to torture themselves as much as possible while still growing from the experience. For example, the self-knowledge challenge is all about answering the questions of “where are you coming from?”, “what’s made you you?”, and “where are you going?” You’re asked to come up with a creative way to answer all of these (with guidance from a list of many more specific questions) that will challenge you and speak to what you’re truly passionate about. One of our graduates wrote, performed, and produced her own album. I’ve heard other students mumbling about creating zines, huge art installments, plays, fashion shows, and everything else momentous that you can think of. It’s all about what speaks to you.
The self-reliance challenge asks students to acknowledge whatever scares them most in life and then try to overcome it through experiencing it. This is always the most emotionally taxing part because no one really wants to open up their deepest fears and then go confront them. The staff keep saying, “this is not meant to kill you, only make you stronger,” but it’s hard to remember that if your biggest fear is guns or the Bermuda Triangle. I don’t think they would let anyone actually find themselves while walking around in Sudan, but the day is still young. More realistic fears to overcome are of being alone (go camping in the woods for a week by yourself), of religion (go to church camp), of the less fortunate (go live on the street for a night), and so on. It’s all designed by you and your committee so the possibilities are limitless.
Community Service challenge isn’t so much of an issue for the lovely kids at my school who are already volunteering all over town, working in soup kitchens, building houses for people, and putting in hours at other schools’ after school programs. Yep, they’re angels. Um, and then for some of us who cry like a baby when their own education might be ruined unlike everyone else’s and who try to get out of community clean-up day at all costs, community service is a really hard thing. Okay, so I’m not that good of a person. I’ll admit this. Coming up with a project was tricky and luckily I already had an issue that I was passionate about so I didn’t mind jumping right in. For everyone else though, they basically adapt whatever amazing thing they’re already doing and make it work for their graduation process which is completely unfair. If you ask me. No one has, though. They don’t really…talk to me, seeing as I’m so below them and all.
And finally, the professional challenge. Ah. My favorite. All you have to do is pick a career that you think you might be interested in and research it. Interview people in the field, look up what training or schooling you’ll need, and job shadow someone or try to get an internship if possible. This fourth part doesn’t necessarily come with a “challenge” part that has to be overcome, but students can still make this look like anything they want it to. In fact, you’re reading a ‘professional challenge’ right now. Yep. I decided that my future career is to be David Sedaris. It’s like Being John Malcovich, except way less creepy.
My biggest piece of advice for my fellow teenagers would have to be that it’s idiotic to go through life without an official High School Diploma and without a college degree. I’m worried that they’re all going to shy away from graduating from the VFS and attending something after their time here. I don’t think my community actually gives a fair warning about what life might be like if they have no real records from their time in school ever. We prefer to live in the world of ‘everything’s possible,’ which is fine when you’re seventeen, but is a lot worse when you’re twenty-seven. I tell my friends this, and they kind of smirk at me. “Poor over-achieving public school girl, she just doesn’t get it…” And I don’t yet. I’m only now beginning to grasp the core part of our philosophy that everyone else accepts as fact and can use to understand what they’re currently doing. Maybe I’ll never fully get that during my time here. And that’s okay with me, for as long as I don’t know what I’m missing, I still believe I know better. It’s the perfect impasse.
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