A Fish out of the Hudson – A Sudbury Student goes to India

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You can imagine my excitement when I was invited to speak at The Association of Internation Schools of India (TAISI), the education conference for private schools of India taking place in Goa.

I would get to go to a country halfway across the world on a continent I’d never been to.

I would get to share my views at a conference in a country that’s known to have rigorous views on education.

I was in Germany when I got the invitation email at 1 am. I texted my mom immediately and resisted the urge to wake my brother up and tell him. I was thrilled! I started thinking about what I was going to say. What the goal for my talk would be. I knew I wanted my audience to see my school like I see it. I also wanted them to see there is more than one effective form of education.

But first, they had to understand my school, and I mean completely get what it’s like to be a student at a Sudbury School. I didn’t want to pretend that Sudbury was like a traditional school or try and defend it. I wanted to be real about my experience here and I wanted them to get it.

So, in my talk I wanted to explain how Sudbury is not a school about just academics. Kids here learn how to evaluate themselves, how to set their own goals, and how to be independent. I wanted to talk about how “learning” looks different for every kid here, and how that’s ok. I wanted to show them how our democracy works, how we vote on everything, how the student majority rules, no principal, no veto power. I wanted to tell them how it felt being School Meeting Chair at the age of eleven, what was frustrating and hard, and how it really forced me to understand how democracy works. I wanted to convince them that trust is the most important part of any school. I really believed that I wasn’t just representing what a Sudbury School is; I was representing students everywhere. I had to show that kids have valuable input when talking about education.

I wanted to sound confident, knowledgeable, and natural. To get to this point, I practiced like crazy. I gave my talk to anybody that would listen and when nobody would listen, I gave it to the mirror. Seriously, my friends started being able to recite not only what I was saying but the tone of voice I said it in. I mouthed it silently when it was slow at my job (I actually got into some kind of awkward situations because of that). I whispered it on the plane to India when I couldn’t sleep. I even tried recording myself, but ended up only being able to listen to it for about 10 seconds. I thought about what word to emphasize in every sentence.

So finally, we get on the plane to India! At one point, I look behind me nervously thinking that I’ve lost my cell phone. My eye meets a chatty Indian woman with bright orange hair, who starts setting me up with her grandsons. She starts telling me how gorgeous they are and how their mother is Italian and they are both in law school etc, etc. I was definitely flattered, but – no thank you.

Fifteen very long hours later, we landed in Mumbai. As we drove away from the airport and towards south Bombay, I was mesmerised by just how different it was from Kingston — there were auto rickshaws and two wheelers weaving (kind of like playing Grand Theft Auto) in between traffic. There were slums and multistory buildings right next to each other; dogs, cats, and of course, the occasional cow, the endless broken symphony of car horns, and then the bright colors that seem to shout out to you.

When we got to Goa I was tired, hungry, and just really gross. At this point, we had been traveling for forty eight hours and I was stressed. The cab ride from the train station to the hotel was about an hour and it was all winding roads with what felt like a speed bump every five hundred feet. The houses were so colorful and pretty, the environment was tropical and I swear to god we saw a group of palm trees that looked exactly like the cover of Where the Wild Things Are. My mom kept trying to chat but I was not in the mood (sorry mom!). I just wanted to get to this hotel.

When we finally got there, my panic was temporarily delayed by the ridiculous lavishness of the hotel. I mean, it felt like we were in a movie– it was huge and right on the beach. When we first went in, they gave us a cold towel. Then someone came out and handed us a rose, then a necklace. We were laughing so hard because it felt like a culture shock within culture shock.

I was really excited to get to the conference so I got down there as soon as I could and immediately felt like a fish out of water. There I was in jeans and a t-shirt, the youngest person in a room filled with professionally dressed educators and principals. I didn’t know anyone and I was worried no one would take me seriously. I didn’t even know how to check in!

I found Jeff, the staff member from my school who was also speaking at the conference, and he helped me sign in. I got this cool name tag that said “speaker” on it and I started to feel a little more comfortable, so I talked to some people about Sudbury but the conference was pretty much over for the day. Then Raghava, the curator of our session, showed up and soon after, so did all the other panelists. We all proceeded to a rehearsal.

The first speaker to rehearse was Deepak Ramola who is the founder of Project Fuel. He goes around learning life lessons from all sorts of people and then turns them into curriculum. He was super nice and and a great speaker. He sounded so natural and conversational and was actually interesting. He had obviously put a ton of effort into his talk and I was like, “Damn! I wanna sound like that.”

Then went Babar Ali, who was one of the only kids in his village to go to school. When he was nine, he would go after school and teach the other kids what he had learned that day. At the age of sixteen, he was named the youngest school headmaster in the world by the BBC. He now has over five hundred students between two schools, both of which are completely free. All of the teachers are former students. Recently, Babar was offered a full scholarship at a prestigious university in the United States and turned it down because he knew his students would suffer without him. He was really shy, but he talked to me a little and showed me the text book where one of the chapters was about him. It was like the sweetest humble brag I’d ever heard. Throughout the whole rehearsal he seemed really tired and looked like he was about to fall asleep and I was like, “Me too, Babar”.

Kalyan Akkipeddi, who is the founder of Protovillage, talked about his village which is the prototype for a sustainable village in rural india. He bought 5 acres of land and he, his family and 12 other families built (and are building) the village. They harvested 200,000 gallons of rainwater and started a seed bank for the other villages. His point was to show surrounding villages how to be interdependent within the village. During his talk I was just like, “Oh, my god!” Everything they did was so inspiring.

Then followed Saba Ghole, who after graduating from MIT, started a maker school in Cambridge, MA where instead of classes, they have studios where the kids have projects they work on like designing things for wheelchairs or bio clothing. She was really nice and even laughed at a silly joke I made, so I liked her even more.

On the morning of my talk, I arrived at the venue early enough. There was someone speaking before our session. His slides were full of boring statistics, graphs, and more graphs. He talked about how much more money there was to make in the International School business in India. I was just thinking the whole time, “Wow! This is the exact opposite of our panel.” His talk was followed by some great talks by my fellow panelists. After Jeff’s talk someone asked a question about Sudbury. Something about how they had had trouble with how little structure they had in college and how much worse off they would’ve been in a school like Sudbury. That question completely freaked me out and I figured that they already hated us, so I went to the bathroom and frantically practiced one more time. I was determined to change their minds!

Finally, I gave my talk, just as I had practiced it: clear, slow and articulate.

After my talk, to my surprise, everyone wanted to talk to me. One woman even told me I was inspirational. Someone else said I was a great speaker. One person even wanted me to speak at his conference! And there was this one very earnest woman who looked me in the eye and asked, “Amelia, how can I make my kids self driven?” (I bet she didn’t even see the irony in that)! Someone else said they were questioning everything, not only as a teacher but as a parent. And then, the guy who had asked Jeff that question, came up to me and I was like “ok, here we go”, but to my surprise, he only wanted to know more. “What do younger kids care about in school meeting? What motions do they make? How do they vote on things like staff salary?”

It seemed as though everyone really understood Sudbury. I was honestly so proud of myself. Earlier, I said my goals were to show that there was more than one effective form of education, and that kids do have valuable input to add. I felt like I had done that and that felt really rewarding.

All of this attention went straight to my head and I was like, “I can’t talk about Sudbury any longer, I must go for a swim!” So I did.

There was a wine and cheese social that night and everyone there was trying to talk to us! This stern looking headmaster came over and was like, “I wanna be part of the cool people conversation” or something like that while I thought to myself, “Ah, so this is what being famous is like.” Again, straight to my head.

Afterwards when everything started to calm down, I started to realize how important it is for schools like ours to go out and be a part of the larger education world. We can’t just stay in our bubble. I saw the need for student perspective. I realized that nothing is going to change without it. I had just done one of the scariest, yet most rewarding, things in my life and it was over and that sucked but all I could think about was how lucky I was to have wormed my way into this group of people. I can’t wait to do it again!

The Growth of a Sudbury School

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While we have not yet started to make a big deal of it (yet – just wait), we are fast approaching the 10th anniversary of the first day of school in our building on Zena Road.   Between now and June 14th, I will be writing some blogs that will provide some history of the school.  In this first installment, I will discuss the school’s enrollment.  This particular topic is in the forefront in my mind because we are starting to face one those good news/bad news situations.  The good news is that we have the highest enrollment since the very beginning of the school.  The bad news is that is looks like we will have to start thinking seriously about how we handle a waiting list.

For those who don’t know some of the details of the early years, I will provide a bit of history before I get to the topic of enrollment.  My wife Lisa and I started to talk about starting a Sudbury school in late summer of 2001.  Once we decided that we were going to make it happen, we started talking to our friends about the idea.  Most of them, while wishing us well, did not want to get involved in the project.  Three other couples, however, did like the idea of the school and joined us in the effort to build it.  We had weekly meetings at our house and eventually went public with the idea.  There was a nice article written in the Woodstock Times along with a full page advertisement.  This generated enough interest that our first information meeting at the Woodstock Town Hall was standing room only.  Clearly there was dissatisfaction with the existing educational options!  Once everyone understood what we were attempting to build, most of the people in attendance decided that this was not the type of education for them.  Some, however, loved the idea and joined our founding group.

During the initial founding period, Lisa noticed that there was a large parcel of land for sale on Zena Road.  The location was perfect for a school – easily accessible and in a beautiful setting.  At the time, property values in Woodstock were still depressed so we were able to purchase the land for a very reasonable amount.  We now had the location for the school.  There was only one problem – we would need a significant amount of time to build the school building and we felt that it was important to keep the momentum going and start the school as soon as possible.  So we started to look for place that we could rent for a couple years while the building was designed, approved by the town planning board and then built.

We settled on a commercial property on Basin Road (just the other side of Route 28 from the current school location).  We contracted with the owner and in the late summer of 2002, we had a place to open the school.

As mentioned earlier, there appeared to be a huge pent up demand for some type of alternate education in the Woodstock area.  We were inundated with phone calls and emails asking about the school.  Most of these were very positive, but it was clear that there was limited understanding about how the school would actually operate.  Try as we might to paint the picture, it is really impossible to communicate what a Sudbury school looks like to someone who has never experienced a democratically operated school with no set curriculum and where the students are free to associate with whom they choose.  This pent up demand resulted in us opening the first year at Basin Road with a total enrollment of 62 students.  Within a week, we had 67 students.  Unfortunately, shortly after we opened, we were informed by the local building inspector that the building that we were renting did not meet the criteria necessary for a school.  We made the very painful decision to close the school and focus our energy on getting the Zena Road building built.

The process of building the Zena Road building took approximately 18 months.  As anyone who has ever attempted to build a 5,000 sq. ft. building that meets the construction requirements for a school on a rocky, forested lot in a town with a reputation for making it difficult to do new construction knows, this was amazingly quick.  As we got near the end of the construction the remaining founding group had a decision to make.  It looked like we would get the Certificate of Occupancy in mid-June.  Should we start the school for the last week or two of the school year or wait until the fall?  We decided that we would open the school – even if it was only for two weeks – so that the parents and students who had stuck with us through the process would have something.  So, on June 14th, 2004 I picked up the Certificate of Occupancy from the town building department and we opened the doors.

When we opened on June 14th, 2004 we started with around 25 students.  What happened to the other 42 who used to be enrolled?  Most of them had found other places to go to school in the time that we closed and were satisfied enough with those places that they did not want to come back to HVSS.  More significantly, however, we had a much better idea of how to describe the school and the community had a much better idea of what we meant when we said, “no curriculum”.  Whereas before, people didn’t really believe that we really meant no curriculum, they now knew that we were serious about it.

In the beginning of the school’s history at Zena Road, it became clear to the staff that there were two types of students who enrolled at the school.  There was the group of students and parents who really understood (or understood enough) about the school to make an informed decision that this was the type of school that they wanted.  There was also the group of students who were simply escaping their previous school or educational environment.  For this group of students, it was not about “coming to” HVSS, it was about “not going to” someplace else.  These “escapee” students would almost never continue to stay enrolled.  They were “one and done” students.  This resulted in a huge year-to-year turnover.  A typical school year would start with 35 students and end with 45 to 50 students.  The “one and done” students would not re-enroll and the next year we would be back to around 35 students.

In an attempt to limit the number of “one and done” students, the staff worked to develop ways to communicate how the school operated.  This effort started to pay off roughly 3 to 4 years ago.  At this point the year-to-year retention rate[1], started to change from roughly 75% to greater than 90%.  This increase in retention rate then started to have an impact on the school’s enrollment.  A couple days ago, Shelley told me that we had reached an enrollment of 62 students.  As of this writing, she also has 6 enrollment interviews scheduled.  It appears as if, 10 years after we re-started the school at 84 Zena Road, we are close to matching the enrollment that we had in the heady first days on Basin Road.

There is a huge difference, however, between now and then.  Now, we have students and parents who “get” the school and who understand that it is about freedom with responsibility instead of freedom from responsibility.  Now, we have two staff members with 10 years of experience, one with 6 years of experience, one with almost 3 years, and two new staff members who have fit seamlessly into the school and who are already making huge contributions to the school.  Then, we had 6 staff members who were trying to figure out how to create a culture they had never experienced.  Now, we have a group of parents who are dedicated and devoted to helping the school through fundraising and through building a community among the parents.

Ten years ago, when we opened the doors, I don’t think any of us could have predicted what would happen.  If asked, then, whether we thought we would still be in existence ten year later, I don’t know what the answer would have been.  Looking 10 years into the future, I see some enormous challenges ahead.  I take personal comfort, however, that at the start of this next 10 year period we have a great group of students, staff and parents.  I know that working together we will be able to successfully face any challenges that we encounter along the way.

 

[1] We define year-to-year retention rate as the number of students who re-enroll in September divided by the number of students able to re-enroll.  Students who move out of the area or who graduate are not counted.