A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  But you can in a school. This was what I saw Sam doing as he envisioned his new school. His tremendous frustration and his innate sense of optimism had led him to question the whole setup. And as so often happens, that sense of a new beginning had led him to a set of fresh and vibrant ideas about how to make a school that really worked for teenagers.

  There was only one last thing my new school needed: a name. Fortunately, it came to me fully formed, all at once. I knew it was right. But it’s funny. In the years since, all the talks I’ve given, all the conversations I’ve had, the e-mails I’ve received, no one’s ever once asked me why I called it the Independent Project.

  I named it that for a few reasons. First, I like names that have the word “project” in them. I had coined the name for Project Sprout, three years before. “Project” gave it a sense of moving forward—like it was a mission. And even before I had a name, when I started telling teachers about my idea for a new school, they said, “But we already have that! You can just do an independent study!” I loved that they so didn’t get it, that they didn’t see the difference between my vision for a new school and forty minutes a day set aside for research on a topic of choice. “Independent study” captured so much of what was wrong with traditional school that it just had to be part of the name of my new school. And sure enough, the name caused a lot of confusion. For months, people referred to it as the Independent Study, or the Independence Project, or an Independent Project. “The Independent Project” was such a simple name, and yet so slippery for people, and the mistakes they made in calling it by name were subtle yet profound.

  By the time you’ve finished step two, you will have thought openly and thoroughly about the purpose of high school and identified the essential ingredients of a good education. Your list may not be exactly like the list another group in another community would come up with. But it should reflect what scientists have learned about adolescence, education, and learning—it should be based on some evidence. And it should address the needs and wants of other students in your school.

  Then, putting aside questions about logistics and ignoring obstacles, you will have figured out what you would change about school to make it fit your ideas. These ideas might involve the daily schedule, what students will do each day, or how people will interact.

  It’s essential here not to get bogged down by thinking about what’s realistic or what will be acceptable to others. Envision your ideal school. But don’t stop there. It’s not enough to espouse lofty goals: “kids should love books” or “students will become good citizens.” You need to buckle down and do the hard work of fleshing out what it takes to make those things happen. The concrete details matter.

  3

  BUILD IT

  A dream design is only that: a dream. In order for it to matter, it has to become a reality. For that to happen you need to go through the slow, laborious, and at times painful process of actually building a new school.

  Up until now, your new school exists only in your head, and maybe in the heads of a few others you’ve talked to about it. Now it becomes a real, physical thing. This is a turning point. It can be really fun, and it can be really hard.

  You might actually be laying down mortar and brick. You might be applying for a charter or raising money. You might be inviting people around to your house in the evenings. Or, if you’re like Sam, you are trying to convince a suite of public school officials and staff to formally approve your project.

  In the design stage you were supposed to be limitless. Now the limits become essential. Your dream gets molded by the obstacles and challenges in your way. Part of this process is adjusting your design to fit the constraints of reality, and part of this process is doing whatever you can to overcome those obstacles. In other words, this is the nitty-gritty—where compromises, letdowns, agreements, and triumphs come into play.

  This chapter is about building your new school. For Sam, this involved three stages. First, getting the Independent Project approved as a school within a school in his public high school in western Massachusetts. Second, deciding which students would actually partake in the school. And third, building (or finding) the physical space that the school would occupy.

  At the end of this chapter, your feet will be firmly planted in the office of a girls’ locker room. Sorry to give away the ending, but there is no real suspense in this part of the story anyway. I built a new school.

  But I’m often perplexed, looking back, by the path the Independent Project took to fruition. In going through the events of the year that led up to the Independent Project—my junior year of high school—I’m struck, first and foremost, by the vehement resistance I experienced. I wasn’t surprised then, and I’m still not now, by the resistance itself. Any change worth making meets obstacles. But as I recall the hurdles we leapt that year, I find the severity of some of the responses to my idea startling. At the time, I took it all in stride—I didn’t know what to expect, so I had no expectations. It’s only now, through the lens of distance and perspective, that I find the image of a middle-aged teacher shouting at a sixteen-year-old that “kids cannot be trusted to learn on their own” both hilarious and troubling. Back then, it was just par for the course.

  That course began with Mr. Huron, shortly after the first conversation with my mom at the dinner table. It must have been early October of my junior year. I had decided I was going to start a school; now I just needed to make it happen. I knew I needed to design the school too—its curriculum, its structure, its components. But I also knew that changing something in a school takes a long time. When I wanted to start Project Sprout, I had to spend months trying to get it approved. And that was just a garden! This was a new school. Getting it approved could take forever. So I wasn’t going to wait until my design was complete to begin building the school. I had to start right away.

  And I started right away by going to see Mr. Huron. I needed an adult on board. I wasn’t stupid—I understood that creating a new school would ruffle feathers. So I needed someone who had knowledge about the process for getting something like this approved, someone who was close to the other teachers, who could talk to them, influence them. I also knew that adults don’t like to listen to kids. I needed a grown-up to fight in my corner, so that other grown-ups would take my idea seriously.

  Mr. Huron and I had worked on Project Sprout together. We had toiled side by side almost every day of high school and, along the way, had grown incredibly close. By the end of high school, not only did we run the garden together; he was also my basketball coach, the faculty adviser to the Independent Project, and one of my best friends. We hiked together, played tennis together, and went to conferences together. He even took care of me one night when I had food poisoning.

  But even if I had hated him, Mr. Huron would have been the right person to go to. First, he believed strongly in the power of youth, and in the wonderful things that can happen when you hand young people the reins. He had both witnessed and been a part of making that happen in the garden, with tremendous results. Second, he was a master of being invisible. He was the kind of guy who led from behind, staying in the background, letting students stand out front. If there was a newspaper article about Project Sprout, he refused to be mentioned in it. At board meetings, he leaned way back in his chair, so that you almost forgot he was there, and kept quiet. If he spoke, it was only at the very end, once everyone else had talked, and only then to make subtle suggestions, never commands or orders. It was an adult like this—one who truly believed that young people are powerful, one who trusted them in a deep, serious way, one who could be invisible, and one who could lead without being a leader—that would be essential for this school to be truly different from anything that came before it.

  There was one other reason Mr. Huron was the right adult to work with on my new school: it was the way he responded when I first told him my idea. I walked into his open office, without an appointment (something that perpetually infuriated his assistant but w
hich he never mentioned). He got up and closed the door behind me, which always made me feel like what I had to say was important. I sat down, and I said, “I want to start a school within a school at Green River. I want it to be student run.” Almost everyone else I would tell this to in the coming weeks and months would laugh, or ask if I was serious, or start pointing out reasons it wouldn’t work. But Mr. Huron looked me straight in the eye, and for a little while he said nothing. And then he said, “Okay. What do you need from me to make it happen?”

  * * *

  Mr. Huron was nothing like the guidance counselors I had encountered in the many schools I had observed or the ones I had read about in books on education. He spent hardly any time in his office. It was just a place to leave his jacket and pile up papers he wished he could avoid. He seemed fairly uninterested in filling out forms, putting together college application packets, or even meeting with parents and social workers. He definitely wasn’t a desk guy. Instead, every time I went into the school building, morning, afternoon, or after school, he was walking in his bouncy, athletic way toward some activity with kids: a sports practice, the garden, a group protesting fossil fuels, or hiking a nearby mountain with tenth and eleventh graders. It wasn’t just that he loved teenagers, though that came through loud and clear. It was that, to him, the best way, the only way, to guide students was to do things with them—hike, meet, play tennis, or weed a garden. When he said to Sam, “What do you need from me?” his words captured the quality that made him such an extraordinary presence in the school—he thought of himself as a support and a resource for the things kids wanted to do, rather than as a therapist, a disciplinarian, or a bureaucrat. Nor was it just that he reached out to kids, eager to help with whatever grabbed them most. He embodied another crucial quality—the urge to connect.

  When I first met Mr. Huron, he seemed like the quintessential small-town guy—upstanding, polite, slightly awkward with middle-aged women like me, more comfortable on a playing field than in a meeting. He grew up in the community and was a star soccer and basketball player in high school. Now, in his thirties, he had a short buzz cut and the posture of someone in the military. He drove a pickup, was married to his high school sweetheart, and coached youth sports in his spare time. But under all of that lay something quite different, something vital to good guidance counseling and therefore to a good education. As I would come to find out, watching him with my three sons and countless other kids, Mr. Huron had a nearly bottomless appetite for getting to know people, especially young people, and for forging relationships. Whether he would say it this way himself or not, he seemed to know that you can’t guide teenagers unless you really know them. And you can’t really know them if they don’t also know you. In other words, at the heart of any good high school counseling lies an authentic relationship between adult and teen.

  Sam saw Mr. Huron as a crucial advocate and source of support while he navigated the tangled vines of adult skepticism and high school bureaucracy, but I saw something different. I saw someone who really got teenagers. He had taken one of the most underrated and sidelined roles in secondary education, that of guidance counselor, and put it at the center of the educational experience.

  The conventional wisdom about mentoring is that kids from poor backgrounds or troubled families are the ones who need a mentor, a “big brother,” or a caring teacher. But this represents a misunderstanding of the role of mentors in the development of all teenagers, rich or poor, stable or troubled. As children loosen ties with their parents, they look out into the world for influences and emotional bonds. This process helps them become part of the world, rather than simply part of their family.

  For that process to work well, a couple of elements are necessary. Each student has to feel a real emotional bond with an adult in school. Forty-five minutes in a class with a teacher at the front, no matter how skilled, dynamic, or smart that teacher may be, won’t cut it. Students need to spend sustained time with that adult (this may be why coaches often seem to have such a connection to their players). And though time is necessary, it’s not sufficient. Young people need to work alongside such adults, sharing aspirations, personal experiences, fun, disappointment, and confidences. And the interactions need to unfold in the context of pursuits that matter to those particular students. This is why the fifteen-minute community meeting that so many schools have adopted as a way of starting the day does not work. Adults and teens need to make things together, argue and solve logistical problems, talk about people and places, share successes and failures. I saw Mr. Huron do all of this with Sam and his friends.

  I don’t think Sam and Mr. Huron realized what they had stumbled upon as they began to hatch their plans for the new school. By forming something that was part friendship, part collaboration, and just a tiny part guidance counselor and student, they had taken a crucial first step in establishing the new school. Sam’s steam fueled this particular engine. But Mr. Huron’s readiness to help a student implement his plan was essential. During the ensuing year, Sam and I each realized, I think, that the impact of his school rested on the fact that it was run by students. But equally important, we both saw that it demanded a new, more potent role for adults. Mr. Huron was the IP’s first adult.

  In conversations that mirrored the ones that were happening at the dinner table, Mr. Huron and I began talking about the Independent Project every day. We mulled over what it would look like, how the day would be structured, what we would study, and especially how to make it happen. And Mr. H said that the very first thing we needed to do was get the superintendent and principal on board.

  In any story about a high schooler trying to start a new school, different adults will play the roles of heroes and villains. In someone else’s story, the guidance counselor might play the antagonist, hell-bent on stopping the school from happening. In mine, of course, he was one of the heroes. Similarly, the head honchos of the school—the principal and superintendent—could easily fill the role of power-hungry tyrants, old-fashioned, rigid squares, or cheery, bureaucratic, spineless antivillains. In my story, the principal and superintendent weren’t exactly heroes, but they weren’t villains, either. They were supportive supporting cast.

  Both the principal and superintendent were, from the get-go, open to the idea of the Independent Project. Often, when I get e-mails from students in northern Idaho or Western Australia who want to start something like the Independent Project at their schools, one of the first questions is: how did you get the principal on board? And as soon as I start to tell them that I was fortunate in this regard, that my principal was open-minded, they throw up their hands and say, “Well, see, there you have it; won’t happen in a million years at my school.” Yes, I was very lucky to have supportive members of the administration. But if we hadn’t had such open-minded leaders, the first step wouldn’t have been to seek their support. Instead, we would have rallied all the faculty first, and then used them to sway the administration. There will always be heroes and villains: it’s just a matter of finding the heroes, or at least the non-villains, first.

  For us, that meant setting up meetings with the principal and superintendent. After several long discussions, they both agreed to endorse the idea. They also helpfully informed us what the two hardest steps would be: getting the School Committee and the faculty to approve it.

  The School Committee, a group of elected officials, was responsible for approving any major change or addition in the school. I already had plenty of experience with them through Project Sprout, much of it trying. But Project Sprout also gave me a leg up. I had once gone to the School Committee with a similar, if not quite as wacky, idea: that they should hand over a two-acre plot of land to a group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, so that we could cultivate a garden and supply food to the cafeterias. But in the end, after a marathon meeting, and with a far-from-unanimous vote, they had approved Project Sprout on a trial basis.

  Project Sprout was extremely successful. Three years after it was approved
, the garden was twelve thousand square feet, with an additional acre of fruit production, a greenhouse, a farm stand, and a toolshed. Three days a week, Project Sprout food supplied the district’s three cafeterias. Project Sprout had also become internationally recognized. This didn’t mean the committee would definitely approve the Independent Project, but it did mean they might be more open to listening to crazy proposals from Mr. Huron and me.

  It was the faculty, the superintendent and principal warned me, who would be most difficult to convince. This surprised me at first. The faculty had always been so supportive of the garden! But the idea of a student-run school sounded, from the get-go, like a threat to teachers. Were we saying teachers weren’t needed? Were we trying to belittle their roles, or make them redundant? It’s not surprising that this was their initial impression.

  Second, people in any profession who have been doing something a certain way for a long time can be reluctant to change. Of course, not all teachers are wary of reform, but quite a few, understandably, are. This can make even the most minor changes to a school’s curriculum almost impossible to enact. Mr. Huron, responsible for school scheduling, had for years been trying to convince the faculty to try out some different approaches to the school day—nothing particularly radical. He had suggested extending periods, or having a trial week at the start of the semester where students could preview classes. But his efforts were in vain. His proposals always became bogged down in bureaucracy, usually at the stage of the Curriculum Steering Committee—which didn’t bode well for a change as big as the one we wanted to make.