The School Meeting at Hudson Valley Sudbury School is undertaking a great experiment in how it protects safety, manages conflict, and maintains order on campus. While a few may grimace in consternation, we know that many more will shake with ecstasy and speak in tongues at this announcement: after 18 years, School Meeting has canceled the Judicial Committee (JC). 

We tinkered with JC significantly over the last several years and made what many community members felt like were significant improvements, and we also created a tandem entity, the Restoration Committee, to support individuals navigating the system and especially with interpersonal conflict.  The Sudbury JC system is fairer and more effective than most systems we are aware of, there have been stirring and generative moments in our JC, and many students have cut their leadership teeth clerking the committee. But this is not the place for singing its praises. If you asked alumni and alumni parents for complaints about the school, most would relate to JC.  The primary emotional outcome of the system has been resentment; the energetic outcome, enervation.  The community has not felt ownership of it, and in the absence of buy-in JC has haunted us as a boogey-man of institutional authority, dividing individuals from the collective and each other.  Our community believes JC has facilitated the outsourcing of conflict resolution and undermined the cultivation of interpersonal skills among us.  Rather than each individual sharing personally in the responsibility for managing boundaries at school, the entire responsibility has been claimed by a community institution.  School Meeting (SM) wishes to experiment with processes which will support all of us as individuals to take more responsibility for our own experience at school and for maintaining the boundaries (“laws”) we all agree to when we sign enrollment or employment contracts. At the same time, SM wishes to reduce the total labor and especially paperwork associated with such boundary maintenance.  For all JC’s bureaucratic brilliance, it relies heavily on a byzantine string of clerical tasks and hand-offs between elected officers – it’s too much work, especially when the results produce neither harmony nor truth in the community.  Finally, despite impressive efforts by many individuals to make JC restorative, we have found that simply being called before a tribunal is experienced as punishment by many folks of all ages, and while the experience of punishment may have its place in a healthy community, minimizing it promotes authentic restoration.  SM believes it can only redress this unfortunate (but understandable) cultural phenomenon by dissolving the tribunal and trying something else.  

And so we did, beginning last week.  We owe special thanks for this experiment to our School Meeting Chair, who has spearheaded it and fomented our energy around it since last spring.  We also owe attribution to Summerhill School in England, which for a hundred years has used a system similar to what we are putting in place. Here are the spark notes version of how it will work: 

SM has created a new Resolution Committee (RC) with the purpose of assisting School Meetings Members (SMM) in resolving conflicts, focused on boundary (“law”) violations.  

Any SMM may fetch a Resolution Committee Member (“Resie”) at any time during the school day when they experience conflict or otherwise have a complaint about a potential boundary violation.  Resies, who are elected by SM and subsequently trained by the RC Clerk, will respond immediately by listening, investigating, potentially facilitating conversation, and encouraging and assisting towards a resolution all parties are satisfied with.  Issues may be resolved by conversation itself, and/or they may be resolved by further actions(s).  Resies do not have any coercive power to define what resolution looks like in any particular case, but if they are not satisfied that genuine resolution has occurred, they may send the issue to SM for its consideration, and SM does retain coercive power to impose what it considers a reasonable outcome, if it comes to that.  For that matter, if the aggrieved party or the party which has crossed a boundary does not believe the initial meeting with a Resie produced a genuine resolution, they may also send the issue to the meeting.

SM’s hope is that this system, created as it is by this community, will get the buy-in and ownership any system requires to succeed.  So far, the chances look good: at the mandatory meeting at which this change was approved, there was almost no objection raised by SMM, and there is excitement around it.  An additional intention in trying this is that our entire community will, bit by bit, become expert in navigating, negotiating, and maintaining boundaries.  We also hope that because this system will be so easy to access, it will be more widely used than JC.  And – less paperwork!

I appreciate very much that our School Meeting is flexible, alive, and bold enough to make such a significant change, and is ernest enough to continually seek the best way to create a vibrant community of connected, autonomous individuals free to be who they are and develop naturally, held by attentive community.  There will be a steep learning curve, and lots of kinks to straighten, and – perhaps we will fail! I don’t think so, though. We’ll be reporting back soon – thank you for reading, and for your support! 

Well it’s July folks, and the fish are jumpin’.  It’s been less than a month since our last day of school, but I already can’t remember any of our policies or the Four Square rules.  No, I haven’t been drinking – I’ve just got That Summer Feeling, as Jonathan Richman calls it.  He described it perfectly song:

When there’s things to do not because you gotta

When you run for love not because you oughtta

When you trust your friends with no reason not ta 

The joy I name shall not be tamed

And that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life.

When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it

When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it

When the flat of the land has got the crop down on it

Well when your friends are in town and they’ve got time for you

When you were never hanging around and they don’t ignore you

When you say what you will and they still adore you

Is that not appealing, it’s that summer feeling.

That Summer Feeling is about acceptance, connection, abundance, and fun.  In the summer of 2021 it is amplified by the lifting of covid restrictions – it’s been a long, lonely winter indeed, piled on top of what was already increasing isolation for many individuals in our society.  Please remember the giddy euphoria of these days, the fresh openness of possibilities, and the distinct sense that life is not a fait accompli, because it’s a first-hand taste of what our school offers students every day of the school year, and even on breaks and through the summer, when they take their self-directed sensibility with them into the world.  

Almost all of us, provided we have a safe and comfortable home and are otherwise well, love summer. The light is endless; the warmth invites intimacy.  For students enrolled in conventional institutions, it is a time of immersion in real life, released as they are from the compulsory agendas of educators.  They finally get to live their own lives a little and see what that feels like.  They get to focus on what’s important to them.  They get to be outdoors and run and play and linger.  For many, the best friendships and deepest bonds are made in the expanse of summer freedom.  I remember clearly that as a kid I always felt the most activated – the most alive and most myself – during those blessed days between school years.   

There is a concept in conventional education called, “the summer slide,” which claims that during summer vacations school children lose some of the skills and knowledge they gained during the school year (summer is bad for education).  But the data (see Cooper et all, 1996 for a summary) this concept is based on actually shows more nuanced results: no decline in reading ability, a slight decline in math calculation ability, and a significant increase in math reasoning ability. Math calculation refers to the ability to perform arithmetic by hand (or “in one’s head”).   Math reasoning, on the other hand, refers to comprehension of math concepts and the ability to apply those concepts to solve problems.  In other words, math reasoning is the part of mathematical knowledge relevant to real life, whereas math calculation is relevant primarily to school.  The “summer slide,” therefore, only describes a problem for conventional educators, not for the people who are their students (who are thriving during the summer).  Although the studies focus on reading and math, I wonder if we could extrapolate and put forward the hypothesis that, during the summer, school-skills decrease and life-skills increase.  

Of course, it comes as no surprise to us at Hudson Valley Sudbury School that real life is what prepares young people for real life; our program is predicated on exactly that idea, as logical as it is bold.  We’re grateful to have access to a school which carries the freedom and intimacy of summer forward into the “academic year.”  At our school, students may continue to be outdoors, run, play, linger, and become themselves all year long.  They may continue to learn things like math as ways of thinking and engaging with the world rather than as discrete objects of (apathetic, often painful) study.  They may continue to focus on whatever is important to them, and maybe most important of all, they may continue to focus on what is most important to most of us, and always will be: relationships and connection.  

If there is a lesson we can learn from summer, it is that we don’t need school.  We need time, we need space, and we need each other.  We need to find places we can grow.  Please enjoy your summer, and please rest easy knowing that for the young people you take care of, it won’t have to end in September.  

As I sit here writing this paper, I think about what my life would have been like if I hadn’t enrolled in HVSS, and how things would have changed over the course of my high school years. I’m struck by the thought that I may not have even made it through high school if not for HVSS and its wonderful, accepting community. The fact that I have been able to be open about myself, my interests, and my sexuality is something that I sometimes take for granted, forgetting for a moment that when I was in public school I didn’t have that luxury. I remember how depressed I was even with all of the support I got from my peers and the HVSS staff, and I can’t help but wonder if I would even still be here if not for that. HVSS has also given me the chance to develop certain skills such as self discipline, resolving interpersonal conflict, and the ability to speak out when something is wrong. 

As a child I was bright and outgoing, always keen to make new friends and always up for an adventure. I have distinct memories of the eight year old me asking my peers if they knew that a piranha can replace its teeth. In retrospect, a lot of kids might have laughed at me behind my back, or thought I was a loser because of this. I didn’t care, though, I just wanted to talk about what I was interested in, and, at age 8, that was animals and karate. During the early spring of 2nd grade, the head of one of our local karate schools came to visit and do a demonstration during gym class. We learned a few basic blocks and punches and that was that, for then at least. Then one day the following summer I was having a particularly restless and energetic day. Now my dad, no doubt tired of me bouncing off the walls, suggested I try out the karate school that had come to visit earlier that year. For the next two years, karate, or Tang Soo Do Mi Gup

Kwan, as I learned it was called, became the center of my life. I LOVED it. During the same gym class where I’d first been introduced to it, I would now get up and ask to perform my karate for my peers. 

In the fall of 2013 I started middle school at J. Watson Bailey. This was a massive change for me as my elementary school had been relatively small (about fifty kids in my graduating class). I was suddenly thrust into a school four times the size and four times as intense as any social setting I had ever experienced before. It was also the first year that 5th graders were introduced from elementary school to middle school. The schools weren’t prepared and neither were the teachers, and least of all the students. When I entered Bailey, I was the same bright, happy, and outgoing kid I’d always been, but that soon changed. After the first couple of months I noticed that the kids who weren’t wearing the right clothes, or playing the right sports, or were even slightly different, got made fun of and bullied. I have distinct memories of being laughed at for liking less popular things such as karate and fishing. It didn’t help that I was a pudgy kid with glasses and braces. I soon retreated into my shell and I quickly became less social and much less happy. Though I didn’t know it yet, this was the start of my anxiety and depression, both of which only got worse as time went on. I no longer talked about my interests to anyone except a couple of close friends and my parents; I was terrified of other kids laughing at me. I also became obsessed with my appearance. I remember having panic attacks because I didn’t think I was skinny enough and falling into a deep pit of self loathing because of my glasses, or braces, or hair. Any and every physical characteristic became something to hate about myself. By seventh grade I was begging my parents not to make me get on the bus, saying I felt ill at the thought of going to school; I’d had enough, and my parents and I started looking for a new school. 

When I first heard about the Sudbury philosophy, it seemed too good to be true. I was very skeptical as it seemed like something out of an all too cheery fantasy novel. It is, however, one

of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Through searching online we found a small private school near Woodstock called the Hudson Valley Sudbury School, which proved to be a perfect fit for me. I remember being so blown away during my visiting week at HVSS because of the free environment and welcoming atmosphere. Everyone was so nice and so accepting; it was so strange and alien to me to not feel as if I was being judged at every second. I switched to the Hudson Valley Sudbury school in the fall of 2016, the start of eight grade. It was around this time that two other important things happened. I started fly fishing, and I started preparing for my black belt. Fly fishing was, and still is, incredibly important to me as a way to escape the various pressures of life as well as my own depressive thoughts, which were, for the first time, starting to improve after I switched schools. I started studying entomology as well, learning about the life cycles of trout and the insects they feed on. While I found fly fishing as an escape, karate became more stressful than ever. I was in the dojo 4+ hours a week; the exercise was grueling and the pressure was immense. No one from our school had ever failed the test before, and our teacher was rather determined to keep it that way. Preparations lasted at least 4 months and got more difficult as we went. Thanks to Sudbury, I was able to prepare in school as well. It was such a relief to be able to practice in school without being laughed at; on the contrary, my friends supported me and helped me prepare. This led to me being more than prepared for the test, even though it was over eight hours with no food or drink. At Sudbury I was also able to pursue my next passion, music. 

My first memories of music start when I was around three or four, when my Dad would sing me Johnny Cash and Warren Zevon songs to help me fall asleep. I’ve always loved music, and especially singing. I remember belting out Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55” in the car when I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8. However, it wasn’t until I enrolled in Sudbury that I was really able to explore my love for music. I had been to see the Rock Academy’s tribute to the Rolling Stones and I was completely blown away. These were kids my age playing REAL music,

not just a shoddy school band farting away into trumpets. When I heard they were doing a tribute to my favorite band, AD/DC, I knew I had to join. I got my first guitar for my 14th birthday and enrolled soon after. Even though I originally wanted to be a singer, there was no denying that guitar came more easily to me. If I had still been in public school, there’s no way I would ever have had the confidence to get up on stage and play music in front of strangers. After just a year of playing, I was invited to join Rock Academy’s showband, a group of the best students who are hand picked to represent the school. We would play promotional gigs for the school and local events, and the best part, we get to go on tour. So in the summer of 2019 over the course of a week we played gigs in Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York. I would never have been able to do this without being at HVSS; the fact that I had the opportunity to direct my own learning meant I could focus on pursuing music and bettering myself as a guitarist. I also had the opportunity to start an internship at Imperial Guitar and Soundworks in New Paltz during my junior year. A few months before COVID hit, I got a motion through school meeting to have one day a week count towards my attendance so I could learn how to set up and repair electric and acoustic guitars and basses. I learned how to fix wiring, adjust neck angles, and maintain fretboards. I used this knowledge to take an old beat up guitar from the 60’s and turn it into my own personalized instrument; it has all the right switches and knobs, and it plays exactly the way I want it to. It took me months, but I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. 

At HVSS I learned how much of a difference self motivation can make; this is particularly evident in my own band, Interference. At the same time that I joined the Rock Academy Showband I also joined a band my peers had started, a punk rock trio mainly focussed on covering classic punk and hardcore songs. The first couple of rehearsals we just jammed on some covers, but pretty soon we were playing our own tunes. Most of these took a lot of work to turn into playable pieces. it was frustrating at times, but I learned from HVSS–and JC in particular–that patience and teamwork are key. At certain points in my early days serving on JC

I would get easily frustrated, especially with the younger kids who had a hard time focusing and paying attention; however, I quickly learned that this got us nowhere. Patience and listening proved to be a key part of JC but it also helped my all around social skills, which have greatly improved during my time at HVSS. I have also been president of the Music Coop for my last 3 years at. During this time I organized several Music Coop shows, including when we brought in friends to play at the Open Orbit Festival in 2019. It was strange at first, to be in a leadership position, but I grew into it naturally. It helped that by this point I’d been at HVSS for a couple of years and for the first time in a long while, I finally had the chance to stretch my wings a bit. 

All of my musical experiences have taught me the importance of persistence. I don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to throw down my guitar and quit, but because of the self-motivation and improved self-confidence I gained from my experiences at Sudbury I was able to keep going and push myself to do better. I’ve learned that you can’t give up even when a task feels impossible. Similarly the Sudbury model has shown me the importance of student-directed government and social justice. Before I came to HVSS I’d never heard of student justice and didn’t even know that concept existed; I remember being confused in such a wonderful way when I first learned about the JC system. I was so fascinated and impressed that I clerked JC after just 2 months of being enrolled. Since then I’ve clerked at least 6 times and even served as back up school meeting chair. This taught me the importance of student government, social justice and compromise. It also helped me learn how to debate and articulate my opinions in front of a group of people. 

After I graduate from HVSS, I plan to pursue music to my full extent. I see myself playing my own music with my own band all around the world, playing festivals and concerts for thousands of people. If that doesn’t work out, I plan to be a session player–a musician who is hired to play on records for various artists in different genres. The idea of being able to play on a variety of

records with all kinds of musicians sounds like an amazing opportunity, and one that I’ve been prepared for, in more ways than one, by HVSS. I’ve not only learned how to play music, but also how to read sheet music as well as learn songs by ear. As of April 30th I have been accepted into SUNY Oneonta, the College of Saint Rose, and SUNY Purchase, all for music programs. The SUNY Purchase Music Conservatory, which I have chosen to attend, is a particularly hard program to get into. I would not have learned any of these skills if I had continued in public school, because I would have been far too self conscious. In conclusion, HVSS has taught the value of persistence, determination, self confidence, student justice, and most significantly, how important it is to accept people for who they are without judgement. You never know how much of a difference acceptance can make to someone.

This week the staff has been buttoning things up around the campus and getting ready to (mostly) shut things down for the summer. Inevitably it is a reflective time, and I want to share some of what we’ve been thinking and talking about. In our day-to-day during the year, we often focus on what’s broken at school, so we can fix it, and we become ensnared in the details of our duties and relationships. We tend to forget why we’re running a self-directed democratic school – a school so radically different it could reasonably be called THE alternative to EVERYTHING else. And we forget how remarkable the place really is.

This school year presented special challenges, but spring was wonderful, and we ended the year with the largest and most successful event we’ve ever had and several days of school-wide outdoor activity and games, all ages laughing and playing together “in the natural way,” as one of our graduates called it. For me, it was a celebration of one of my favorite aspects of the school: the familial structure of our community, and the relationships that develop over days, months, and years. Rather than moving on to a new grade, a new teacher, a new school, we all stay together, and move on to a new year. It’s sweet, it’s powerful, and it’s challenging. Sharing resources, figuring out how to get along and set and keep reasonable boundaries, navigating social dynamics, and adapting to everyone’s ongoing development is hard, and inevitably it’s a lot of what goes on here. From the perspective of the school that’s quite appropriate, because so much of our experience in this life depends on relationships and our ability to cultivate and maintain them. In his thesis, one of this year’s graduates wrote that, at Sudbury he learned “how important it is to accept people for who they are without judgement.” The value of that lesson is immense, and in this age of social media, disinformation, and tribal polarization, more valuable than ever before. Living in a tightly-knit community, everyone makes mistakes and occasionally shows their less savory aspects. Everyone goes through annoying phases, everyone does something that offends somebody else. Being a community is fun, and it requires constant work.

Despite how hard the work is, our students do tend to focus on it, because it’s often what is most vital, and because personal growth and interpersonal skills are the foundation for resilience and fulfilment. And they are intertwined. As another of our graduates wrote in her thesis, “I started to find more courage to try new and different things. I soon found that all around me were people who, with kindness and compassion invited me into their community. I learned that, for me, trying new things is hard and tiring, but also incredibly rewarding and empowering.” The community here draws people out and encourages them or otherwise challenges them in whatever way they “need” to be challenged. We’re like stones in the river, clicking together and smoothing each other’s rough edges over time. We all want friends, the support of our community, and to be accepted and valued and loved. This school is about the most fundamental and important human things.

Over and over again, we witness that when students stay in a challenging situation, the result is growth, and a strengthening of relational bonds. When students preserve through enough of them, this school becomes a second home and a second family to them. It becomes the place they grew up, not merely the place they were educated. When yet another of our graduates said goodbye on the final day, she added, “Don’t worry! I’ll be back!” with tears streaming down her face. And we’re not too worried; we know that most of them will come back and remain a part of this community because they love it, and we know that they have a deep reservoir of real human learning to draw upon as they walk their paths.

Best wishes, and have a wonderful summer.

This is part 3 of the 3 part blog. Part 1 can be seen here: Special Snowflake Syndrome and Other Good Questions. Part 2 can be seen here: But What about Academics?

Many people – and the institutions they create – insist that kids cannot handle autonomy in their personal lives, because free kids will inevitably debase themselves, developing indulgent self-regard and fail to learn vital skills like the discipline to delay gratification. At other points in history, majorities of people have also insisted that members of particular races, ethnicities, and genders could not handle autonomy either. But this patronizing attitude has been consistently proven wrong, and it turns out that people, including children, thrive when they are free, provided they have a basically safe and nourishing environment.

Our students do screw around all day.

In my last post, I explained that, actually, yes, our students, particularly younger ones, often do screw around all day, insofar as “screwing around” means “playing.” In fact I can see them playing right now, as I write, all around me. I am sipping my third cup of coffee, sighing, and wondering how they keep it up, and why I do not feel like playing. God, they are loud!. But anyway – play certainly seems to be the primary format of activity that young people are drawn to, and there is clear evolutionary reasons as to why, namely that play is the primary means by which we learned the skills we needed to flourish for hundreds or thousands of years prior to the proliferation of mass schooling. The original goal of mass schooling was nation-building, and it was effective. However, schools created a more rigid dichotomy between “play” and “learning” in the societies it was implemented in, because the schools taugh skills students didn’t want to learn. Thus, “learning” became “work,” and “play” became nothing more than a diversion from work.  Schooling, along with the learning-play dichotomy it implies, have been ubiquitous for long enough that we now take it for granted as a necessity for the education of children and the proper functioning of society.  Within this context, it makes sense that one might be suspicious of children’s ability and willingness to develop into adults without long-term, vigilant, and invasive intervention, and to equate “screwing around” with “wasting time.”

But the dichotomy between work and play does not exist in nature, nor in children who have not yet been schooled; kids learn all sorts of things in play, even if unintentionally, including the skills which are valued in their economy (although, given that play is by definition voluntary, they do not tend to master the suite of skills necessary to function well in an authoritarian regime).  At the same time, when kids are playing, they’re enjoying life, which we should be careful not to underrate, because fun is an important nutrient, and most of us are not meeting the RDA. In fact, it’s hard to overrate having fun.  Usually when we say we’re “having fun” we mean we’re engaged in an activity so fully we’re in a state of flow, an experience which reliably leads to happiness, fulfillment, and enhanced creative capacity; call it “educational” if you must.

The concept of school itself implies that the purpose of a child is to grow up.  But this assumption, aside from being gloomy, is wrong.  A child’s purpose is to be a child, just as an adult’s is to be an adult.  When children are allowed to fulfill that purpose, they do end up developing into competent adults, even though it was never an explicit goal.  Certainly, our  students usually graduate with some weird holes in their “content knowledge,” but this hardly seems to hold them back. And such holes are far easier to fill then, say, a hole where there should be confidence, self-respect, or curiosity. You will rarely find our students bent over textbooks with furrowed brows, chewing on the eraser of a pencil, training for their adulthood. It is much more likely you will find them “screwing around,” fulfilling their purpose, being who they are today, one precious day at a time.