A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  My second assumption was that it was going to happen within the walls of my public high school. I’ve since talked to people who want to re-create the Independent Project, and they have asked me about starting charter schools or creating a homeschooling program, an after-school movement, or an online school. That never occurred to me. I wanted things to be better for my friends and classmates. So, in my mind, it was always going to be part of my public school, and it was going to be available to everyone.

  And finally, though I knew my school’s curriculum would look unlike anything in traditional school, I assumed that, physically, my school would look like any other. When I daydreamed about my senior year, I pictured a classroom with a chalkboard and a whiteboard and desks and posters on the walls.

  By the end of my junior year, we had the school district’s approval and we had our students. All that was left was finding a space for the school, which, I figured, would be easy. There were eight of us, so we needed only one classroom. I’d just pick the nicest one with the most sunlight!

  Of course, it wasn’t so simple. The school wouldn’t give us a classroom. They needed to use all the rooms for regular classes. They offered to find an empty room for each of the eight periods of the day; we could just move every time the bell rang. No way. The students couldn’t feel like an add-on whose needs were secondary to the rest of the school, shoved around at the whim of the other classes. Also, we were trying to abolish arbitrary periods and divisions, to have our schedule be fluid and natural. If we had to get up and move every time the bell rang that feeling would be ruined.

  So they offered us the band equipment room. As long as we didn’t mind hearing the music lessons all day and having students come in each period to get their instruments, it would be perfect!

  No, thanks. Mr. Huron and I found an abandoned farm stand across the street that was on school property. We had built things together for Project Sprout. We could spend the summer fixing it up and insulating it!

  It didn’t meet health and safety requirements. There was a separate building by the tennis courts that had been used by a special education group but was now out of commission. Could we use that? It would be perfect! Like a little schoolhouse!

  The school didn’t want us that far away.

  I understood why Mr. Huron and Sam were so intent upon finding just the right space. They wanted a room of their own. They knew that the Independent Project had to be more than a few special classes, or a replacement for afternoon electives, in order to have the transformative impact they were seeking. Even the most well-meaning and supportive members of the school—the principal, the superintendent, and some of the more enthusiastic teachers—didn’t really get it. They assumed that as long as Sam and Mr. Huron had use of some classrooms some of the time, they should be able to do what they had envisioned. That was based, at best, on a misunderstanding of the scope Sam had in mind. I knew this right from the beginning, because when I ran into various staff members from the school, they’d say something nice, like, “It’s so great that Sam wants to do this awesome independent study,” or “We heard Sam is beginning an independent project—that’s great.” It’s amazing how important an article such as “an” or “the” can be. I knew from that seemingly meaningless slip that they didn’t get it. They thought that he was adding one more interesting option to the range of courses, independent projects, and activities they already offered, another item on an à la carte menu. They didn’t fully see that this was actually a prix fixe meant to replace their old menu.

  A group of kids who want to start their own school can do it in any number of settings, but they do need a space of their own. The space doesn’t determine what happens in it (that is up to the students and the people who support their efforts). But having a distinct place dedicated to the new school embodies one of the central ideas we are talking about: that kids have ownership over their own educational experience. Whether a classroom, an unused counselor’s office, a screened-off section of the library, a little-used woodworking room, or a small building somewhere on school grounds, four walls and a door are essential. They announce to everyone—the faculty, the administration, the parents, and the other students—that the student-run school has substance, in every sense of the word. The school must take shape. But what shape it takes will depend on the kids who start it, the existing school, and the community, as well as the locale itself (city, rural, suburban, crowded, sparse, etc.). Some schools have space to spare, and others do not. All students will benefit, as Sam did, from having to figure this part out. The search to find a place, and the students’ right to stake out their ground, is a vital part of the process.

  Some students will start a school for five kids, and others may start one for fifty. Some kids will start with a full year’s program; others will make it the fall term only. The details are important, but that doesn’t mean they have to be the same in each setting, for each group of students. One of the things that makes a student-run school so compelling is that each group of students must figure out what they need to create a program that works for them and for the larger community. We know now that children do best when their families have homes. It’s the same with a school, no less so for one run by students. They, too, need a home of their own.

  I could see Sam pushing back against the subtle efforts to contain him or rein in his ambitions for the project. Each time the administration tried, in one way or another, to shrink what he had in mind, or keep his plans from breaking too far away from the regular structure, I held my breath a little, wondering who would win this silent battle of wills.

  Mr. Huron and I spent the whole summer looking for a location for our school. Long after we had accepted our students, sent home letters, held an informational Q and A for parents, and gathered the group to make pizza and start to get to know one another, we still didn’t have a physical school. It’s funny, really, if you think about it. We went through all this bureaucracy to get the school approved, they finally said yes, and then they had nowhere to put us. Throughout that summer, Mr. Huron and I would call each other with ideas. “I’ve got it!” I’d say. “The auditorium!” “Already asked,” Mr. H would say. “Spring musical gets priority.” It became a joke between us. We’ll go to school in the garden! And build fires in the winter! We’ll construct a tepee in the hallway!

  I thought Mr. Huron was making another joke when he finally told me where we could put the school. He called one day in August. “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that the school has offered us a space for the school that can be our own, and we can use it all day long without interruption.” “Awesome!” I said. What could the bad news be? “Well,” he said. “You’re not gonna like where it is.”

  It was the coach’s office in the girls’ locker room.

  We have good news and bad news too. The beauty of the kinds of changes we’re talking about is that they can take almost any form, anywhere in the world. Your new school could have a thousand students or five students. You could construct a beautiful building with great facilities or plop the students in a locker room. These changes, unlike many popular educational reform proposals, don’t require elaborate equipment, expensive new technology, complex schedules, or even abundant resources. They just need one really powerful, invaluable, irreplaceable resource. Kids.

  That’s the good news. Though Sam was shocked to find out they’d be in the girls’ locker room, it was actually one of the wonderful things about the program. It didn’t matter where they were—they didn’t need computers, a library, a SMART Board, or even a chalkboard! They needed one another, and their own space to think and work and learn. Likewise, if you’re starting your own school, based on some of the same principles we’ve discussed, you can do it anywhere, in any form.

  The bad news is that you will, almost without fail, face many of the same difficulties as Sam. People are reluctant to allow change. Committees and school boards will balk; teachers will fight you; y
ou will make enemies and maybe even lose friends. That is part of the process of building. Don’t be deterred. Be flexible and reasonable. The goal is to make this work. But the key is knowing the difference between the elements that are immutable because they embody your educational ideas, and those that can be adjusted.

  There are great classrooms and schools all over the world that function in the most unlikely settings and do things in an unexpected way. There is no really strong reason why a school committee should refuse a well-thought-through school that better serves the needs of its students and takes nothing away from the existing system.

  And the trial of building your school will be worth it. If you’ve followed these steps, you’re now standing in the coach’s office of the girls’ locker room. Or you’ve cut the ribbon on your new building. Or you’ve cleared out space in your attic. There are five of you, or fifty. You meet in the fall term, the spring term, or all year long. There isn’t only one right kind of space or a crucial number of students. It’s essential only that you have an educational idea and a plan for how to put that idea into action, and that you’ve worked out the basic logistics, so that you can coexist with others in your community. Now comes the fun part.

  Your first day of school.

  4

  YOUR FIRST DAY

  Most of us have had some variation of the naked-on-the-first-day-of-school dream. That’s probably because, for most of us, the first day of school is a little exciting and a little scary. Will we make friends? Will we like our teachers? Will we embarrass ourselves or stand out in our first lessons? Will it be too hard? Boring? Who will we sit next to on the bus? For us, at least, this mixture of excitement and fear never went away completely, though with each passing year of school, from kindergarten up to senior year, it abated a little.

  For Sam, however, that changed in his senior year of high school. Because that first day was not just his first day of a new school year, but the first day of a new school. The Independent Project. And so, for you too, there will likely be a mixture of emotions on your first day. The most prominent one will be anxiety.

  You’ve done all this work, first deciding to start a new school, then designing it, and finally building it, and today it actually begins. What if it’s a disaster? What if you let down your students? What if you were wrong about changing the way school is run, and your experiment crashes and burns?

  In this chapter we talk about the first day of the Independent Project, and the week of orientation, or de-orientation, that followed, and why what happens in those early days is so important.

  I remember walking through the maroon doors of my public high school the first day of the Independent Project, scared shitless. It had finally dawned on me just how stupid I had been. I had spent my junior year convincing the faculty and School Committee to allow me to run an alternative school within a school, when I had absolutely no idea whether it would work at all. For all I knew, it could be a total disaster. In fact, I thought in my increasingly anxious mind-set, it probably would be a total disaster! I should have just left things as they were. I should have spent my senior year cutting class after lunch to go get ice cream and steal lawn ornaments with my friends. Instead, the fate of eight students’ high school education was now at stake.

  I had arrived an hour before school started, because Mr. Huron and I had a job to do. We had decided it wouldn’t be fitting to start our new school by telling the students where to be. How could we start something radical on conventional footing? If the students arrived and we told them to go to their room and began taking attendance, it would send the wrong message. I wanted, from the moment they walked through the school doors, to be sending the message that everything would be new and different.

  So instead of leading them to the girls’ locker room, we let them find it. We created a scavenger hunt that took them all around the school, with clues taped on the stage, under a lunch table, on the door to the principal’s office. While everyone else was bustling around, noses in their schedules, reading off room numbers and times (8:49, Chemistry, Room B52), our students were wandering around, working together to solve a scavenger hunt. They would arrive not at some arbitrary time (first period, 8:07) but whenever they had managed, as a team, to solve the clues. And the final clue, of course, would lead them to the girls’ locker room.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Huron and I waited in a small, ten-foot-by-ten-foot room that smelled, well, like a locker room. All it contained was a table, nine chairs (which Mr. Huron and I had lugged in earlier in the summer), and a rack of basketballs. The only windows led into the girls’ locker room, and they had, of course, been blacked out. Sitting in the drab, beige-colored room with its fluorescent lighting, my hopes weren’t very high.

  “Relax,” Mr. Huron said, and I tried.

  Eventually, the students arrived, each of them with their mouths slightly agape. “Is this really where we’re going to school this year?” said Tim, looking around. He was tall and lanky, with dark curly hair and a round face. His mother was Korean and his father American, and his skin was a very light tan. He had moved to our school two years earlier, and he had become part of my friend circle. He was funny, bright, and very talented. The short music videos and skateboarding films he put on YouTube were watched by almost everyone in school, and it was not uncommon to hear his beats coming out of someone’s headphones. But despite his quick wit and abundant talent, he had struggled to excel in school. I would learn, in the coming months, that this was largely because, though he did well in class, outside of school he would always focus on music and film production over homework.

  “Welcome to your new home,” said Mr. Huron.

  There was a pause, during which I worried that they would just turn and walk out, straight back into traditional classes. Luckily, Dakota spoke up. Dakota, whom I knew from her work on Project Sprout, was a small, short-haired girl, boyish but attractive. Her mind was like a razor, and she had coasted through school with relatively good grades without ever applying herself. She had a dry sense of humor that was unusual in high school and made her stand out. She could have been a good-looking member of the Addams Family. In her usual monotone voice, not really looking at anyone as she spoke, she said, “Excellent.” Everyone laughed. And I began to relax.

  A lot happened that first day. We started with an activity that eventually became part of our daily routine. We called it check-in. Everyone would take turns saying how they were doing, what was going on in their lives, what was new, and, in the beginning, what had happened over the summer. That first day, Mirabelle pointed out that “check-in” used to be a regular part of the day in elementary school, but disappeared from the schedule at some point during middle school. Why? Our lives outside of school have a huge impact on our lives inside of school. If your dog died yesterday, you’re never going to be as productive today as you will be, hopefully, tomorrow. Having your peers and colleagues aware of your home life can only help. It also allowed us to start to get to know one another, and as the Independent Project progressed, it became a time to talk about our work and our passions. Being connected to and involved with one another’s work and interests made us more effective at collaborating and pushing one another.

  Sam met one of his best friends when he was two, in the day care program they both attended. In fact, his friend told me not long ago that he can still remember when it was diaper-changing time, and the two of them would be hoisted up on the table to get “powdered up.” By the time they were thirteen they had befriended another boy who joined their school in seventh grade. In high school the three of them were inseparable. They went through everything together: missing the cut on teams, winning championships, meeting girls, breaking up, smoking pot, sledding, writing good papers, writing bad papers, getting into a brawl in town, applying to college, going to prom. There wasn’t one important step in adolescence that they didn’t take together, in one way or another. Yet they weren’t alike: they didn’t fall for the same girls, they weren’t
good at the same sports, they took different classes in school, and they had very different aspirations. Their bond with one another didn’t simply transcend those differences—it fed on them. They each seemed to have more options, more dimensions, a fuller life, because of one another.

  If you think about your own teenage years (whether they are happening now or happened thirty years ago), what comes to mind most vividly? Chances are, the best moments—those when you felt most alive, vigorous, joyous, and strong—involved friends. We now know that social connections are essential to well-being. When you feel closely connected to others, you can face almost anything. When you feel isolated from others, it’s hard to thrive. But this is never more true than during the teen years. If you think about it for a minute, it makes complete sense. Though friendships matter in childhood, the central bond is still with one’s parents and other family members. In adulthood, one’s closest bonds tend to be with a romantic partner and one’s children. In adolescence, when teens have left the circle of childhood and are not yet in the circle of adulthood, Lewin’s “marginal men” turn to the other marginal men and women—their peers.

  Earlier I described the beeper study by Csikszentmihalyi and Larson and talked about how disengaged and listless the kids felt during much of their everyday routines. But they weren’t always bored. The diaries the teens kept made it as clear as daylight that they felt best when they were doing things with their friends. A recent wave of research on social media and their impact on the inner lives of teens provides an intriguing clue about this. It appears that though Facebook often gives teenagers a momentary feeling of sociability and connectedness, when they go offline they feel even more lonely than they did before. In other words, even now, in the age of the Internet, nothing replaces being with flesh-and-blood friends, in real time and space, doing real things together.