Duct-Taping Your Butt To A Chair - The People, Part 1

            It takes a village to raise a child.

           

            It takes a Village Free School to raise a child (I’ve been working on that one for a while). Self-congratulations aside, it really does. And my peers and I are the living proof. 

            You know what? - let’s talk about my peers, shall we? For as much as I like to rag on them (and I will do so, I assure you), they’re actually…really great. Really great. I couldn’t say whether it’s the people we naturally attract or the environment we put them in, but these are the nicest and most honest students I’ve ever met. Maybe it’s that we’re not capable of holding lasting grudges against each other or that we just know each other’s angry faces by now, but most of us get along on a base level. It’s pretty hard to actively dislike anyone. Like, in an ‘I’m going to murder your first born’ kind of way.

            For priding ourselves on our diverse state of being (which I’m not denying- free school is pretty far out there), we definitely attract types. There are the guitar players, the artists, the skaters, the long haired smelly kids, the gamers, the dreaded (haired) Rasta wanna-be’s, and the manga-loids. We don’t get preps, we don’t get athletes, we don’t get intellectuals (for the most part), ‘partiers’, Goths, fashionistas, kids who would literally have no friends were they in public school, or minorities. No seriously. There was an African-American two years ago, but she has since left. It leaves all of us white folk scratching our heads a little over how to solve this issue. We’ll let you know when we have a good answer. At least our anti-discrimination statement at the bottom of all of our public marketing includes an extra little something special. To quote directly: “We don’t discriminate against anyone ever, because that’s just mean and wrong.” I can almost hear our executive director saying this out-loud to himself, nodding and then typing it up.

            This stereotyping is pretty much the case in every age group. You can see in the youguns who will be what kind of a stoner when they grow up and who will write D&D fan fiction. They’re the most adorable, though. I swear, and not just because my baby making hormones kicked into high gear this year, those children are the cutest things I’ve ever seen. I really wish I had spent more time in Room A over the past three years. They always kind of scared me up until now. I didn’t want to be climbed on by snotty hands and made to do macaroni art projects for hours on end, which is what happens when you step inside their little kid vortex. Those poor volunteers, I thought. At least the staff members were getting paid for their efforts. However, it struck me recently while watching the little A’s frolic around the art studio that they really do have the most fun.

            Sometimes their adorableness can be put to good use, as well. Not that we wish to exploit their charms to make a profit, but fundraising has never been hurt by a smiling five year old in a pink tutu. Two years ago a student drew a picture of herself at school and slipped it under our executive director’s office door as a present. He liked it so much that he put it on the next round of asking cards being sent out to previous donors, and sure enough, someone else liked it, too. We got one thousand dollars off of that little girl’s doodle, and they made sure to tell us that it had been the picture that had simply melted their hearts. This is also the same child who pulled the office fire alarm a few days later after mistaking it for a light switch, so you have to factor out the cost we paid the fire department to come out to our building when you’re adding up her net gain for that week.

            Now, I know us big kids aren’t supposed to pick favorites, but I’ll just say that there was a little lady in Room A this past year who absolutely won me over. I liked her even enough to cross the threshold of that madhouse to come and sit with her. After being asked to watch her one morning by her frantic mother, she learned my name and quickly decided that I was the coolest older kid in the whole school. Yes, it’s true, I am, but most children just won’t admit it. Since older students don’t hang out too terribly much with the younger crowd, when Room A kids meet someone who gives them the time of day, they love them forever. And after that morning, she and I were best friends. She loved seeing me in the hallway when I was passing through and she held her tiny arms out and cried “LESLIE!” as loud as possible. I would run to her and she would wrap herself around my lower half, almost buckling my knees in. She could do this all day, too. She was like a goldfish with a five second memory and would keep this routine up every time we met, even if I had just come through. I bet if I had stood next to her long enough without speaking, she would have turned with those big eyes and shouted “LESLIE!” once again, with a big hug to match.

            It turns out I knew of this little darling before we were besties. During our first adventure week of the year, one of the staff decided to host a lunch buffet for everyone at school each day of the week. I signed up to be on kitchen crew with my good friend, thinking we could both avoid actually participating in anything. The idea was that we would start with $30 in donations, use that for our first day’s groceries, and then ask for $2 a person to pay back what we owed. This system worked pretty well all week, except for that first day when kids weren’t aware they would be charged in advance. We received a lot of I.O.U.’s and upset calls to parents happening in the lunch line that put the entire process on standstill, but every child was fed regardless of the ‘rules’, at least on that first day. Then came up the smallest of all Room A children who could barely reach the serving tray station and was just a pair of miniature hands and a disembodied voice. I explained to her that it would be $2 and she squeaked back that she didn’t have that kind of cash on her. She ambled away before I could stop her and was lost in the crowd of kids. Five minutes later, the disembodied voice returned, with the hands carrying a bright blue piece of paper.

            “Here you go.”

            She handed me the electric blue card and proceeded to the front of the food line without a second look. I examined the roughly chopped piece of paper. There was a giant number two written in the corner, and in large, robotic child letters across the front, was written “Georgia” (her name). She had given me a Georgia Dollar. This was not a tongue-in-cheek move that an older student might attempt to be clever, but a sincere belief that this paper was just as valuable as the green ones everyone else had. For some reason, I felt very proud.

            Then there’s Reginald. He attended the VFS two years ago and left the biggest mark on the school that’s ever been dealt. That this tiny Room A boy could do so much damage is almost unthinkable. Of course, it completely helped that he had a face like an angel, so when you saw him walking down the hall you didn’t immediately suspect him of suspicious behavior. He was the dictionary definition of a firecracker, destroying almost everything in his path. He was always so hyper; he would come into rooms running at full speed, zooming under furniture, picking up items and chucking them across the room, going into other people’s cubbies and pulling out their belongings. You couldn’t have open food containers, bottles, or bags out because he would get into them without fail. And it was really like watching a walking, breathing pinball machine; you could barely catch him tearing into one thing before he was at your side slurping from your drink and then bouncing on the couch the next moment. Like lightning, that boy was.

            We used to have a coffee station in Room C until we caught Reginald at it one morning eating sugar straight out of the bag with a slobbery spoon that he maniacally dipped in and out. Our advisor grabbed him by the stomach and hoisted him upwards away from the table. “Stop! You’re hurting me!”

            “Well, are you going to stop eating our sugar?”

            “Let me go!”

            He was dropped to the ground and quickly leapt across the room onto our cushy chair, jumping and beaming as if he hadn’t just complained of being crushed.

            “I was faking!” he chortled, and dashed off past the growing crowd right back to the sugar bag which we had stupidly left unattended. He scooped another spoonful of sugar into his small mouth before the staff member had him by the stomach again, wriggling in this grasp. “Stop, stop!” he screamed as he disappeared down the hallway back to the confines of Room A.

            We generally liked having Reginald in Room C for entertainment purposes. Being a word-loving girl, I highly enjoyed the time he bounded into the room wanting to play some game he called “battle”. “Tug-of-Battle, Tug-Of-Battle! Come on, you guys!” He soon ran out in search of more competent playmates as we stood around staring at one another. Eventually someone offered quietly, “did he mean Tug-Of-War?” and the room erupted into laughter. It was pretty cute. We could also prompt him to say adorable things when the moment was right. A staff member was trying to get him to return to Room A for clean-up while he was running in circles like usual. One boy who was watching all of this said, “Tell her that her words are offensive.” Reginald smiled giddily and declared “Your words are expensive!” before darting out the door once more.

            The next month, an older student was on her way into the kitchen when she noticed a pool of red liquid at her feet in the doorway. She tore into the room, to discover Reginald and his trusty sidekick Winston sitting on the tiled floor with the box of kitchen knives open in front of them and two foot-long deathly utensils clutched in their hands. A bottle of ketchup lay at their side, as well, sliced open with a bread knife still embedded in its body. She managed to not faint, and instead proceeded to coax the knives out of the boys’ hands before calling for a staff member.

            That incident, and his usual manic behavior, is why we currently have the Room A Certification law. That rule was created to keep him and his friends from destroying the entire building and each other. Before the time of Reginald, Room A students had free reign of the entire school and could move from room to room like every other student. Since adults are evenly spaced throughout the building, it was pretty safe to assume there would usually be someone there to helpout and supervise. It was soon realized however, that Reginald needed to be in a fully enclosed, well-guarded space, not unlike a maximum detention facility. Sadly, rules cannot be fairly bent for only one student. On a very gloomy day, it was voted upon at ASM to make it so that no Room A student could leave their homeroom at anytime without a staff presence. Even though we would all miss our little buddies dancing around the school, it was for the greater good to lock away the whippersnapper before something terrible happened. Eventually a certification system was implemented to allow those kids who could prove their maturity to be able to leave unsupervised, but that took a while. In the mean time, the school building was a much quieter place.

            In an awful way, that was a fortunate turn of events. Having shrieking kids and moving bodies in the same room as active classes was incredibly distracting. Room A students, although adorable and mostly worth our time, do slow down every process they get themselves involved in. Meetings take three times as long with all of their basic questions for clarification, and having them hovering over students who are in classes and constantly talking is a disruption to the entire group. In fact, I think I took their lockdown the best out of everyone. Probably because I’m cold hearted and actually wanted to be able to concentrate on things. Aren’t I awful?

            Not that we don’t get that behavior from Room B students, as well. They excel at messing with the dynamic of the school. If you walk into Room B at any time, you will most likely find it empty. This is because they split up into groups and roam the building all day long, causing noise and disruption wherever they go. Of course, they get things done - things that the rest of us couldn’t hope to accomplish. As I’ve said, they practically run most ASM’s, hold almost every position on the J Board, are the most active during clean-up time, and then pity the rest of us who can’t seem to find the heart to help out. They actually get kind of passive-aggressive about it. Even though all students participate in clean-up at the end of the day, it’s well known that the Room B students put in ten times the effort that Room C students do. Because of this, some days we arrive at school to find nothing in Room C picked up or cleaned in the slightest, aside from the things that were under our jurisdiction. It’s an interesting problem since we’re not willing to actually pull our weight during cleanup either. Mostly we end up challenging whatever cleanup team made the most obvious job of not doing their work, which only makes them hate us more.

            The raw energy of the Room B kids gets to me. There are fifteen to twenty of them and mostly boys. Mostly all boys in the sense that in my third year here we have only one girl. The influx of middle school-aged boys is pretty obvious when you think about it, although it took me a few years to believe it was anything besides punishment for a crime I must have committed in a past life. At ages eight, nine, ten and eleven, young boys are just hitting their stride of rambunctiousness and like to yell, scream, fidget, move around, and play. This makes it hard for them to be stationary in a classroom for six hours a day. In an era where a lot of adults are turning to pills to cure their children’s ‘problems’ with attention, it’s heartening to see some recognizing the actual issue: that their children are eight, nine, ten and eleven year old boys! So most of our younger set come from public schools where they were constantly in trouble for their behavior. Their parents decided to send them somewhere where learning happens along side all of the running and yelling that they feel compelled to do. That also says a lot about the ability of girls to just ‘play the game’ of schooling and conformism, considering you hardly ever hear of young ladies having such “attention problems.”

            One day our executive director came up to our homeroom and posed an interesting question from the doorway: without counting, what do you think the boy to girl ratio is in Room C? There was a long pause followed by a few timid replies of two to one, three to one, maybe. It was a loud morning full of the usual disruptions and I remember coarsely yelling out the highest guess of three and a half to one. Our exec. laughed at that, then told us the true statistic: One to one. For the first time in years, Room C finally had the same number of girls enrolled as boys. Like Room B, the older students generally have more males for the same reasons. So why would everyone guess something much different? Our exec. said that every person he had asked that morning had given the same skewed guess as ours and that he wasn’t surprised by our answers. The truth was, it just felt like there were far more boys than girls crowded into that room. They take up more physical space with all of their moving and playing and for the most part, they are louder, smellier, ruder and more obnoxious (although some girls are really fighting for those titles). While everyone else shrugged their shoulders, the staff advisors did their usual “Take notice of that, boys” routine. This news gave me heart to make just another one of my bold, impassioned, completely despised speeches calling for immediate change in the behavior of my peers. I average about one of these a week and I am always looking for a spot to interject one into daily conversations, so my classmates are getting very good at coming up with rebuttals. The boys argued that, “well, the girls should just take up more space! If they want the room, then take it!” I decided not to continue fighting with their horribly warped idea of how to share the room, and went back to my doodling.

            Part of the reason why it feels like there are more boys than girls even in Room C, is because of the amount of younger boys throughout the rest of the school. Like I said, they populate the entire building and love to spend time in the older kid’s room hanging with their teenage buddies. So at any given time, I’m sure we do have more males in the room than females, but that argument was ignored.

            One can really falsely sense how many more boys we have by the amount of cussing, video game playing, and scraped knees we get by the end of each day. We would do well to have a school nurse once we can afford to have one on the payroll. There used to be a ‘gaming room’ until the staff vetoed the operation and shut it down one summer. I say room, but it was actually a five-by-ten closet in the basement with no window and four computers crammed in there all humming away. Kids would enter at nine in the morning and not leave until clean-up time. The issue was first brought up as a concern by some female classmates who worried that their peers were not taking care of themselves when they stopped coming out to eat their lunches or get any physical movement at all. That used to be the cool hangout spot where you could usually find most Room B students. The one thing that could get them out was Sprout, our school’s version of dodge-ball. Enough of them wanted to release internal energy that only a couple hardcore fanatics remained in that dark closet while the gym was open.

            I personally have a problem with so many damn boys running around - the cleanliness of the school goes down. That sounds rather stereotypical, but you wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen.

            Example A: entering the kitchen to find a Room B boy getting himself a cup of water. He took one of the ceramic mugs that we have available and filled it up underneath our specially filtrated water spigot. Then, he put the cup right back face up in the cupboard. “What are you doing?” I pounced. Flabbergasted, he replied, “I’m just putting my cup back. Geez!” “Yes, but you’re putting it back into the general pool. Someone’s going to come along and use it.” As it dawned on me just how many cups I had used out of this cupboard over the years, I asked, “Do you always do this?” “Well, yeah,” he said, “It’s face up so no one will use it. What, you wouldn’t want me to waste water and wash it after every use, would you?” Once again, it dawned on me how I had never before thought of a distinction between cups turned up versus down, my anger mounted and I yelled, “Take the damn thing with you! Don’t put it back for *gulp* people to use.” He stormed off, clearly upset by my unjustified and random burst of anger. As I vowed never to use another piece of school dishware again (a promise that I’m horrified to say I haven‘t kept) , the cup remained face up, sitting innocently amongst its ambiguously clean comrades.

            This is the same young boy who was solely responsible for the second annual Microwave Day by putting a metallic mug in the machine. Hon, if you’re reading this- I’m not holding it against you, but I believe you have a problem with cups.

            As precocious and inappropriate as they sometimes seem, I forget that they are little ones at their core. During our school-wide Protest For Cookies, I was sitting with a different B boy discussing what was currently happening a few rooms over. He was sitting in Room C waiting for our advisor to do her usual lunchtime out-loud reading session. I explained how most of the school was protesting for their right to cookies which brought the excitement to his voice as he got to his feet, full of political zeal and screaming for justice. He looked ready to go join the fray with fire in his eyes, until he promptly sat back down and said, “I’ll go after chapter book, though.” He then proceeded to have a cute little book read out loud to him while he munched on his lunch of carrot sticks and a peanut butter sandwich. 

            A third younger boy, also a favorite of mine, has had quite a few moments like this, so it’s harder to pick the best. This particular young man likes to discuss the more grotesque side of life and strike up conversations on world domination, the possibility of a coming apocalypse, and all of the gruesome ways that one could die. During one of our school’s many insect infestations- this time with ants- he surprised us all by calling an emergency ASM to denounce the killing of any of the bugs to get rid of them. “They can feel, too!” he yelled, on the verge of bursting into tears. Alternative methods of eradication were discussed, while I groaned in the corner about being forced into a half hour long meeting for the sake of a couple hundred pests that he normally pontificates about brutally killing, along with the rest of the human race.           

            Yes, Room B students are full of surprises, but they don’t interest, irritate or generally confuse me as much as my fellow Room C students. I have to say, I have a lot to say on this subject. Let’s do this.

            Our staff members were clever to dub us the “’C’ monsters” this past year. We resemble squirmy, slimy, wet monsters in so many ways. I should start by saying something that my peers would never expect to hear from me: they’re all incredibly nice people. I don’t get the chance to say that nearly enough, probably because I spend most of my time being somewhat pissy while at school, but I’m writing this over summer break and have been away from them long enough to be honestly reflective.

            They’re all thoughtful, kind-hearted, understanding people who I’m honored are a part of my school community. I’m never embarrassed around them or afraid of being judged in any way, because I know that we all get each other. It would be hard not to, being in such confined quarters. That’s truly the only reason why I complain. It’s just like being around loud, slightly abrasive family members everyday for six hours. You begin hating each other.

            Not that I would participate in ‘trust fall’ exercises with them. One day our activity was to bond by falling blindly backwards into a pile of each other’s hands and expect them all to concentrate enough to catch the faller. I watched the mingling of fingers and “oh, wait! Hold like this,” moments while the faller stood unaware. If concentration means silence, then we were playing a very dangerous game. The screams from the catchers mid-fall sent shivers up my spine for the victim- I mean, faller. I sat out, reaffirming my decision when the first child came down with a large crash. I don’t know where that sound came from- maybe a God-given warning- but it was entertaining. I think the rest of the students had fun, though, with this activity. They bonded and learned to trust one another; I honed my ability to recognize situational irony. I wish I could just let go and join in with the group. I’m not a team player, but everyone around me is. If everyone acted like me, the room would be a lot more pissy, self-absorbed, and boring. I believe we all know this to be true.

            Mixed ages and maturity levels make it harder as well. There really should be four homerooms, although I realize that’s a bit excessive. But, I don’t think anyone in Room C would disagree. Even last year, our youngest room members went off and set up a kind of ‘home base’ in a different room, unintentionally creating their own mini homeroom for the ages in between rambunctious twelve year old and brooding teenager. In essence, the Middle School Room, or Room M. This was welcome because - and no offence to them- the tweenagers are the hardest to live with. They’re in the throes of the worst, most awkward stage of growing up and they’re shoving it in our faces for hours on end. It’s like, “we’ve already experienced all of this and made it out! Go deal with your confusion and embarrassment somewhere else!” They’re constantly discovering themselves, and their peers, and their peers’ reproductive organs. I have heard more boob and penis jokes in the past year than a public school health teacher. I wasn’t aware that those were the funniest words on the planet, were you? Or that the idea of someone having boobs or a penis is worth laughing about for four hours straight? Still no? It’s unbelievable and I’ve told them as much, but what can I really do against the power of newly released hormones? They commonly argue that they’re only commenting on how amazing the human body is and how they’re empowering themselves by challenging social conformities and using those words in regular conversation. “Personally, I like BOOBS and I feel like I should be able to say the word BOOBS. What’s wrong with liking BOOBS? You’re all so hypocritical. BOOBS! BOOBS, BOOBS, BOOBS!” It would be really daring and progressive of them if they weren’t tweenagers who are just covering for their new found fascination of their changing bodies using phrases picked up from a liberal community. And it’s never breasts, always boobs, to further aggravate my own sensibilities. Unfortunately, the staff buy this. “Of course, honey, no one’s stepping on your freedom to say those words. You’re right, penis is not an often used word in conversation. Break conventions, little ones- be free!” So they’re allowed to go on. I feel like it would do them well, as young as they are, to have someone tell them that the reason no one uses those words is because they’re inappropriate for nice conversation. End of discussion.

            It’s not like the older brooding teenagers aren’t without fault. I know I certainly bring my own little rain cloud of gloom with me into the room everyday, or boy troubles, or erratic, mood swing behavior. Sometimes the tweenagers even cheer me up when their general compassion and undiminished youth shines through. The younger they are, the more sincerity they show. I remember I came to school on Valentines Day in a complete emotional tizzy over my boyfriend not having contacted me. “He didn’t even ask me to be his Valentine!” I whined to an uninterested crowd (this is what we do instead of first period, in case you‘re wondering. We sit around the couches sipping coffee, and do an unsolicited check-in with whoever‘s in earshot). My boyfriend and I had been going out for over half a year at this point which everyone knew, so my reaction was… you know, slightly clingy. Slightly. Our youngest Room C student disappeared from the room for half an hour and came back with the biggest Valentines Day card I had ever seen. She presented it to me with full honors, glittery bobble hearts on top, yarn streamers, handmade paper bag full of candy, and all. I’ve never felt so touched.

            After that I had to concede that she was, in fact, cooler than Stephen Sondheim, which was an ongoing debate between us. Sometimes I like to annoy my classmates with random Broadway trivia, and she had become aggravated when I claimed that he was cooler than everyone else in the known universe. The youngest C’er contested this immediately (she also leads us in morning group sing-along’s of a ditty entitled “I’m The Most Awesome Person Ever“. Instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, everyday we are all asked to rise for Katie’s ‘Awesome’ song.) Well. She was clearly wrong and we’ve spent many hours arguing this, but in the end the Valentine endeared me to her so much that I allowed that one small concession.

            We have some slightly strange characters in Room C, asides from the plain adorable.

            There is a boy. He walks around with no shirt on. I call him, “No Shirt Boy“. His hobbies include climbing things, parkour (whatever that is), and wooing young ladies in Room C. The story goes that he was walking in the Summer sun one afternoon and chose to remove his heavy button-up shirt. Once stripped down, his natural human instincts emerged and he swore to never be fully clothed again in society‘s oppressing garments. Whatever the boys claim, I simply remember him showing up at school with limited amounts of clothing on. At first he did have a shirt that he found acceptable - a black mesh tank top- but even that was discarded after some time. His basic outfit became a pair of grey cotton shorts ripped at the knee and a zip-up jacket to cover himself when important people were visiting the school. No shoes either. Even in the winter, I never saw him with anything else on. It was an issue of legality after it was an issue of propriety. We thought for sure he would start wearing real clothing again once our exec. explained how it was against the law for him to be undressed like that on school grounds. But, this is free school and the law was totally infringing on his freedom to be naked. If I were our director, I would have fought that one every single day, but he ran out of steam after a couple of attempts and No Shirt Boy was allowed to continue on. To complete the look, he’s even grown his hair out and now resembles some lost island castaway or version of Early Man. One day he came in with glittery silver paint over his nipples. That’s really all I have to say about that.

            I mentioned earlier how we attract types of people, and no where is this more obvious than in the students of Room C. It’s like someone goes around to skate parks and independent music stores and passes out flyers for the school. My first year at the VFS, we had a huge population of skater boys who dominated almost everything we did since they were the majority. I butted heads with them quite a bit, but they did give me something to do. Now that they’re gone, I have no one to reliably be mad at.

            Every field trip was to the skate park. If they chose to stay on school grounds, they’d be in the parking lot gliding smooth circles around a group of three or four girls oohing and awing appropriately at their various maneuvers. Of course, then they’d come inside and stink up the place with their sweaty man smell. And since they had just been exercising for hours, they were hot as hell and had to open up every window in the room, which are many and most of an entire wall. This was in the middle of January. I would have killed them, but my hands were numb and I couldn’t feel my legs, so movement wasn’t an option. And since my dying of hypothermia was the minority condition, their freedom trumped mine and I had to exit my homeroom for about two months until the spring brought back the function of my vital organs while in Room C.

            Then if they weren’t skating, they were playing music. Because what does every male between the ages of 12 and 25 in Portland, OR know how to do? Say it with me, now: Play acoustic guitar! That’s the modern mating call of the hipster race; they would never win the ladies without being able to serenade them with a tune from one of their favorite undiscovered indie rock bands. Therefore, it follows suit that most boys at my school can also play this magical instrument, although few have moved beyond the ranks of the Top 40 pop list. I don’t want to think about how many times I’ve heard “Here Comes The Sun”, “Dream On”, or “Hey There Delilah” playing in a horrifying loop directly behind my head. You too, can bear witness to this by listening to the soft ringing sound coming from my ear canals - it’s those songs playing on repeat from the darkest crevice of my skull. We do possess a pretty spiffy music room downstairs though, where the future indie rock-stars go and practice with a full drum set, two pianos, and every little noise maker they could want. My first day at the VFS, I was ushered down there by the skaters who began to play some wonderful song about California that I can never remember the elusive tune of. The customary girl companions hit percussion pieces and bobbed their heads knowingly. It was actually quite intoxicating, and I don’t think I could have been welcomed into the community in a better way. 

            The one charm I’ve neglected to mention about all of my teenage peers is that, first and foremost, they’re not associated with any public school system. A surprising amount of our older students have never been inside a standardized classroom, and have therefore never been tainted with the horrible air that seems to be pumped into those institutions. It makes kids go insane. They’ve never had to use ceiling acrobatics to get down a hallway during period change, or fit all of their textbooks into a small rusting locker (we prefer to scatter our crap out freely and equally through the entire room everyday), or have been fit into a harsh social structure imitating the adult ones surrounding us that puts you as either popular or not (most likely, not). Those of us fresh from high school can easily spot the pure unencumbered spirit of the people who have just obviously never been through that shit. The transition can be hard for older kids though, who haven’t yet had the years of ‘de-schooling’ to adjust. To make up for this, some of the teens try to duplicate their high school experience, you know, the horribly crappy one that they came here to avoid by making everyone attend embarrassing holiday dances and putting on school plays that the entire student body is forced to participate in (despite whether or not they knew who Shakespeare was, or could even read the script). But the most important aspect of being a teenager that they could never leave out is the falsified drama, and I’m no longer talking about The Bard. I’ve always thought that most teenagers’ terrible misfortune and “oh my god, I hate my life” moments are manifested purely for their own entertainment. After all, cat fights and messy love triangles are so much more entertaining than SNL these days. My student body proves this theory.

            And what’s the one thing that goes along perfectly with messy, unneeded drama? You’ve guessed it: teen love. There is nothing more dramatic than fighting over a guy, hooking up with someone, breaking their smitten heart and then making a scene by going steady with your best friend’s ex, all in one afternoon, no less! Now, I love really attractive members of my preferred gender just as much as the next teen ------------------------------------------- (that was me pausing to watch a group of boys walk by), but I try not to be so obvious about it, especially at school. There just isn’t any point in even looking. With fifty kids, fifteen teenagers and only eight of us with naturally good looks, it would be hard for anyone to find a date.

            Luckily, for a long time this wasn’t a big deal at all. There used to be an ancient story passed around from year to year- a myth, some claimed- about a boy and a girl who started dating while still in school. The legend goes that they went out for as long as a few months (which is why it’s widely believed to be a myth) and then over the summer, the boy dumped her. He went on to college, leaving town entirely. When she came back in the fall, she cursed all of her friends for not supporting her during the split and flew off into the night, never to return again, except on visiting days and for special fundraisers. This tale of woe had been passed down through the years, with all of the students who had known these two personally keeping this story close to their hearts. They knew to never date anyone at the school because really, we’re just too small of a group. Of course, flirting will always be allowed so that we can show each other who we would be going out with if we could.

            Unfortunately, the ones who shared this story with me have all moved on by now and a whole new group has come in who don’t know anything about this and have spent that much longer in the catastrophe that is public school. I must say, the new ones held out pretty long though, without causing much of fuss; probably because they were all still dating kids from their old schools or just weren’t smart enough to realize they were surrounded by other teenagers who were equally deprived.

            Imagine a room full of teenagers sitting on a donated black leather sofa with the surrounding chairs creating an uncomfortably close circle, and staring at each other, all day long. You can almost feel the repressed hormones smacking you on the head with a baseball bat (or some other stick-like object).

            At this point in the tale, I’d like to direct you to a story I had previously written about, oh, two years ago. All of the students I talk about are long gone and new, even hornier teens have taken their place. I’d love to share with you all of the bizarre misadventures of our current set (you’d just kill to hear about the love life of No Shirt Boy, wouldn’t you?), but I have neither the time nor the patience to account for everything that’s happened since. So please enjoy this little blast from my past.

            Eh-hem.

           

            When this whole mess started, I was sitting on a couch in Room C. One of the other eight teenage girls walked in and sat down next to me. I should have recognized it then, that sneaky little glint in her eyes that says, “Look out, I’ve got news that’s supposed to be secret, but I’m going to tell it anyway.” I was too busy worrying, like usual, about what I might say to whatever she was going to say and if I’d sound stupid starting my comment with ‘Well’ or if I should just nod knowingly no matter what. It was my general rule to avoid conversation altogether but sometimes I was forced to make exceptions.

            “Did you know that Girl #1 is dating Guy #2?” she asked. I shook my head slowly, trying to imbue it with as much focus and active listening as I could fake. Obviously, my failed expression of interest made her realize that I was not the gossiping type or that I was an idiot, so she slowly got up and walked back out of the room. This bizarre encounter should have tipped me off, as only girls wishing to share ‘life-changing pieces of gossip’ will come over, tell you their juicy info and then walk away with a sense of accomplishment and without another word. I guess I subconsciously refused to acknowledge this upcoming epidemic. Still, I must admit I was a little thrown off by this piece of news. Girl #1 and Guy #2? Dating? I supposed it was possible although I had never actually seen them engage in any kind of conversation longer than passing glances and was sure she had been flirting with a handful of other boys just the other day, but then again, those things are the usual requirements for dating someone in high school.

            The next thing I knew, it seemed like everyone was talking about this new relationship and when I got tired of hearing those three gossip, I left Room C to find a quieter spot. Some of the other teenagers recommended hanging out in the empty closet under the stairs that they had recently fixed up with a television and a few chairs. I let them go, thinking of the crazy staff member who allowed a group of teenagers to transform a closet into a hideaway with a door. I learned later that this room had been converted into their little clubhouse weeks ago, when a failed attempt at creating an industrial arts area had left the room vacant and smelling of sawdust. Ah, the perfect conditions for budding teenage love.

            The problem came when more couples started popping up (one can only hope not discovering their love inside of the closet), and the tough questions started being asked. When Girl #3 began going out with Guy #4, our Room C staff advisor wasn’t quite sure anymore about this teen hideaway.

            “Is the door ever closed? Because it should always be open from now on,” he badgered them. After Girl #5 started going out with Guy #6, a discussion was raised around what exactly was going on in this closet and even what kind of movies they were watching. “The 40 Year Old Virgin? The Notebook? Unacceptable.” They were banned from anything involving sex or sexual references. One time I was walking down the stairs and I heard the faint sounds of video game battles coming from the school’s copy of Spy Kids 3: Game Over, a movie sure to turn anyone off.

            Now before I go any further, I would like to make one thing clear. When I say these kids were ‘going out’, please note that I only refer to their amorous behavior this way because they do. They claimed to be going out so that’s how I’ll phrase it too, though after actually talking with all three of these young couples, I have deduced that not one of them had actually ventured out on what the rest of us know as a date and generally only saw one another at school. So ‘going out’ and ‘holding hands in the hallway then making out in the closet under the stairs when no ones looking’ were  essentially the same thing.

            And they probably were making out (or worse, bum, bum, bum!) in their closet although everyone denied it. Our teacher seemed to think so, too. One day during our regular Morning Meeting, he decided enough was enough and lectured us all on the rules regarding this special room. When asked what was so wrong with being alone down there, he responded by saying, “The fact is, teenagers alone in a room with no adult supervision leads to sticky situations.” I couldn’t have said it better myself, and needless to say, I will never enter this room again.

            The sad truth is, this situation is only going to get more dramatic and comically worse. It’s already started. The same day that the teacher made this announcement, Girl #5 came skulking into the art studio where I was drawing and started telling me all about how Guy #6 had just dumped her. They had been ‘going out’ a total of 24 hours and he had dumped her brutally, crushing her heart completely and leaving her no hope to ever make it through the afternoon. I suppose this was no worse than the other boy who was in there earlier telling me all about how his girlfriend of five days had just cheated and insulted him over text message.

            “She’s a real bitch,” he whined, informing me that first thing tonight, he was ending it. At least he had actually taken her on three dates already, though I have no idea how he managed this over a five day school week. But then again, I can’t fathom how she could have already cheated on him unless she had planned this whole thing in advance which is too ridiculous to even consider, meaning that’s probably the case.

            I didn’t tell him this and I didn’t tell Girl #5 that a one-day relationship was nothing to be upset about and that she should try not to get too worked up about it. The last time she had had a crush on a guy at school was before the dating game had begun so she had been dumped without actually having gone out with him, which I’m told is the most painful thing you can go through and much worse than being dumped by even a long-term boyfriend.

            What I’m really not looking forward to is when they all start breaking up. It’s only a matter of time, as the Teenage Dating Rules instruct that a true teenage relationship can last no longer than two weeks. Any longer and you’re practically not a teenager so go get married or something and leave the rest of us alone. (No, I’m not jealous. What makes you say that?). It will only be a matter of days until they’re all broken into pieces and will be telling us all about how they can never love again.

            Sadly, the best thing about breaking up for them will be the excessive amount of drama and hearsay that will be caused. They will feed off it and then think to themselves, ‘how can I cause even more drama?’ The answer will come to them all at once and then the rest of us better stand back. They will realize after breaking up with all of their respective partners that they are now a bunch of single teens who are clearly willing to date and feeling just as lonely as the next person.

             A mix-matching game will begin and there are just so many possibilities! Girl #1 and Guy #4, #3 with #6,  #5 and  #1 and so on. And after they all break up we get to deal with the resulting heart ache and tragedy. This of course could last for days or even weeks. The really tough part is that small student bodies call for small school buildings and when this all happens it will be difficult for them to avoid each other the way they normally would in a huge building housing 2,000 other kids. We only have one hallway and six classrooms. With so few kids, it’s a huge accomplishment to effectively avoid someone and with so many people trying to avoid each other, it will turn into a game of hide and seek where no one’s it.

            I don’t know what I’ll do two months from now when I’m sitting by myself again, out of everybody’s way, and Girl #5 runs in to the room screaming, “I just saw Guy #6 in the hallway!” What- for the hundredth time today?

            How long will they grieve for? I can’t imagine how long this game can last or how long it will take them to forget about it entirely. I will not tolerate receiving text messages in my college dorm room from these fools telling me about how they just saw so and so at the mall. I doubt that will happen, but I’ll probably change my number when I move away, just in case.

            You see, I’m still baffled by this crazy need to date people that you don’t really like just so you can make-out once and then have your heart broken. Not one boy has proposed that I join this school dating game- although some did flirt with me but that stopped too, when I took to sitting in a corner and listening to Broadway musical soundtracks all day long which is apparently not a sexy, or even remotely attractive activity. Luckily I’m not the only girl or guy being left out so there’s no real shame, just a slight sense of resentment and the feeling that my horribly awkward social skills are somewhat to blame. At least writing is a solitary activity.

            It reminds me of the Marshmallow Experiment my mother told me about. Scientists tested younger childrens’ ability to bypass instant gratification or delay it for an even better prize later on. They were offered one marshmallow right then or they could wait thirty minutes and receive two marshmallows. They traced these kids into adulthood and discovered that the kids who could wait to get their two marshmallows did better in life. Those who understood the saying “good things come to those who wait” were able to reap the rewards while the ones who were all about settling for whatever was available in the moment had a harder time in life, as this need carried over into everything they did.

            I suppose, just maybe, that teenage dating is like that and even, God forbid, magnified at our little free school, where classes are optional and you can pass the day making goo-goo eyes at someone if you want. It’s hard to hold out for something real when that kid across from you on the leather sofa is giving you the eye and there’s a vacant closet downstairs with your name on it. But if everyone could just get these crazy hormones out of their system for a little bit, we could all go back to normal and not worry about manifested drama or sticky situations or whatever. I mean, can’t we all just act like normal teenagers for once and…oh, I see your point. Maybe their marshmallow just tastes sweeter than my two. 

            And that’s what she said.

            Wasn’t that nice? But wait- what really makes it is the follow-up. So I clearly have a distaste for my classmates’ lovesick shenanigans. Of course, they all went on to have disgustingly messy break-ups and to torment me, the angry little hermit that I was (I suppose I still do sit in my corner quite a bit ignoring them all, but I like to believe that my corner has moved closer in towards the group, now occupying a more central spot on the big couch). You know, it’s so funny that I mention all that stuff about ‘holding out for something real’ and ‘playing the mix-matching game with potential partners’ and ‘making out in closets’, because…well, ha ha….it’s a funny story.

            Last school year I was still in full hermit-mode and only just getting comfortable talking to some of the kids I considered “cooler” than me. I was mostly afraid of embarrassing myself in front of the indie rockers and the stoners, who had a surprisingly un-mellow way of talking about the “losers” at our school. We had a big event at the school and I ended up befriending some of them for the first time in my two years there, to the point where I actually got someone’s number. I thought ‘oh, what a lovely gesture’ and moved on. But there he was, texting me as soon as I got home.

            “You seem pretty cool. Do you wanna’ come get high?”

            “Um, no. Thanks, but I don’t do drugs.”

            “O thaz’ cool.. Wanna’ go on a date instead?”

            “Um, sure.”

            And so began the bizarre relationship between the school’s top pot-head and the resident Broadway-wonk who had never said anything more to him than, “shut the damn window!” Yes, he was one of those skater-boys. It was a doomed relationship from the start, but can I just say that he reopened my eyes to how much fun being a teenager is. If you can’t tell from my cynical writings from a few years back, I spent most of my teen years pretending I wasn’t one, until I had a boy kissing me in a back closet. I suddenly understood what all of the fuss was about.

            I knew he was only with me to get over a different girl at school whom he had just ended a relationship with. And I will admit to going out with a different boy from school while in the heinous process of getting over King Pot-Head. The marked resemblance to my previous story struck me so hard that I almost couldn’t bear having it in existence out of embarrassment, but obviously, I’m glad I kept it. Hopefully, I’ll never participate in the mix-matched exes game again, although it’s much less ridiculous when you’re going through it.

             As a side note, I was this close to falling into the trap of drugs and late night “dating” that the previous group of older teens seemed to always get into. I desperately wanted to remain in King Pot-Head’s social circle and was about a day away from committing some irreversible act when I met the cutest, most sheltered boy at a class that I almost didn’t attend. We hit it off and instead of impressing the ex-boyfriend with my hardcore partying and weed inhaling abilities, I impressed the new boyfriend with my clean and sober attitude AND Broadway trivia. When he asked to be the antagonist of my book for his own entertainment, I just couldn’t say yes, knowing that he’s a sweetheart and that he unintentionally walked into my life on the right day and saved me from being one of the “bad” free-schoolers who go down hill instead of up. I’ve never mentioned any of this to him, but he’s definitely changed me for the better. Even if he likes to tease me about my schooling.   

Duct-Taping Your Butt To A Chair - The Philosophy, Part 2

The Philosophy, Part 2

            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.