The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  In any new community, the school is likely to be a flash point. Differences in beliefs and values among residents are more liable to surface there than anywhere else. These days, the odds are that the source of conflict will be a result of pressure from conservative Christian groups, especially active in the local public school system. Who could forget Ralph Reed’s exhortation to his legions, when he was executive director of the Christian Coalition? “The future of the country is determined in the principal’s office, not the Oval Office. I’d rather elect a hundred school board members than a single president.” The resulting battles over school board elections, multicultural curricular reform, school prayers, creationism, secular humanism, and super-morality consumed the energies of a whole generation of parents and teachers.

  No such religious agenda embroiled the stakeholders of Celebration School. Among residents, there did exist a branch of Moms in Touch, an organization that encourages Christian mothers to meet and pray for their children’s schools. This prayer group met on Monday mornings. Individuals occasionally raised moral issues with teachers from a Christian angle. One succeeded in preventing the observance of Halloween festivities in a lower neighborhood. Others complained when “the Noah story” was taught in a class where every culture was shown to have its own creation stories (and still others petitioned the grocery store manager—unsuccessfully—to stop selling alcohol). But for the most part, there was no substantially organized Christian pressure group in town, nor in the Osceola district itself, at least not compared to neighboring counties like Polk and Lake. Celebration School’s antagonists had different fish to fry.

  FIRST BLOOD

  Along with the first principal, Bobbi Vogel, several teachers in the starting lineup had been recruited from an innovative program at Highlands Elementary in the Osceola district, but most had been trained in traditional methods. An elaborate book-length document of principles and “essential learnings”—known as the “DNA2” design—had been hammered out by Vogel, Donna Leinsing, head of curriculum, and other senior teachers in the year before the startup, but very little was ready to go by the time Celebration School opened in the fall of 1996 (contrary to the advice and desire of the school board). Classes commenced not in the school’s own (unfinished) building but in the neighboring Teaching Academy, designed for quite a different purpose. The resources were simply not there, especially for the senior school, and many teachers were ill-prepared to team-teach or to interpret such a nontraditional curriculum. Everything was makeshift. The new residents, some of them still living out of suitcases in nearby hotels, were about to live through Celebration’s first trauma.

  Accustomed to getting customer satisfaction without delay from Disney, many pioneers were already facing long waits to move into their houses, and were in no mood to be told the school would need a few years to come up to speed. Why sacrifice a few years of their children’s education on what some were beginning to perceive as a social experiment? Within several weeks of opening, a group of distressed parents were loudly assailing the school, its staff, and its methods. Their children, they alleged, were not progressing, but were actually regressing under these methods, and with no apparent discipline to stem the decline. The group included one of the new town’s poster parents, Rich Adams, an ex–fire chief from Pennsylvania, whose family had been showcased (“Residents begin to Arrive!”) in TCC’s promotional newsletter, the Celebration Chronicle. Since the town was crawling with journalists and TV crews, Celebration’s first genre story about “trouble in paradise” was catapulted into the public eye as Adams and others made their dissatisfaction known in several interviews with TV and the press. In a flash, MSNBC and other national media outlets had superheated the story. Even if they had anticipated the fishbowl effect of living in Celebration, few residents had bargained for this kind of media attention so early on.

  Overnight, the swampy air was rent with accusations on both sides. Beverley Neff, a parent actively involved in the school, noted how quickly people became polarized: “Even in the first two weeks, parents were asking me, ‘Well, what do you think?’ and very soon we were being persecuted and guilt-tripped if we were not in there fighting the teachers every week. We were being asked, ‘How can you feel that way when this affects your children so much?’ ” In order to plan a response to the accusers, an emergency parents’ meeting was called, as Sara Mumey recalled,

  over Founder’s Day weekend, and was called in a matter of an hour, by word of mouth. We sat there for three hours, and everybody had a chance to say what they thought we should do. There were people who wanted to call a press conference. But by the time we left the room there was a consensus, which is how this town has operated, so far. There was a consensus that we would work within the community, and let the press do what they wanted to do, and say what they wanted to say, but that it was more important for us as a community to make sure that the people in the community who were going to the media didn’t get their way in terms of changing the way things were here. And that’s really continued to be the way that we operate.

  As for a plan of action, three initiatives emerged from the parents’ meeting. One was to circulate a petition in support of the school and its staff, another was to stage a teachers’ appreciation picnic, and the third was to create the Dream Team, a parental support group. The first two further polarized the community. Many residents told me that the pressure to sign the petition and attend the picnic made them uncomfortable. They were not entirely happy with the school either, but decided to go along with the program of support. Terry Neff, Beverley’s husband, paid for a plane to fly over the picnic with a banner message of support: “Great Job, Bobbi, Teachers & Staff of Celebration School.” He also opened the first bank account for the Dream Team, in the name of the “Positive Parents,” a spontaneous decision he regrets, in retrospect, because of the divisive connotations it took on. “I wouldn’t have done it if I had thought it would mean that others were seen as ‘negative.’ ”

  No matter, the incentive to be “positive” in most things related to Celebration was already firmly established and well seasoned by a mix of Disney’s compulsory peppiness and Middle America’s native boosterism. Above all else, loyalty to the “positive” program was virtually guaranteed by residents’ concern for their property investment. In such a climate, loud dissenting is likely to be seen as a betrayal, rather than a measure of the strength of the community. The opinionated quickly become spoilers, or threats to a common investment. On the other hand, the flap over the school meant that, all of a sudden, Celebration’s much-hyped “sense of community” became something real to be fought for. Like any real town, it would now have its share of strife, scandal, and vendettas. But the “positive” and “negative” labels would die hard. Whenever I was asked, as I frequently was, whether I was writing a positive or a negative book, and replied that it would be a truthful book, the response was often one of mild disappointment.

  In November 1996, however, there was far too much at stake for the boat to be rocked. All homeowners, whether they had children or not, could see that the value of their property was going to be tied to the fortunes of the school. Realtors will attest that the value of homes in this region can vary by over 15 percent depending on the test scores of the local school. No one was about to give the naysayers too much leeway. It was hardly surprising, then, when Adams and the other critics began to believe they were being ostracized, perhaps even encouraged to leave. They numbered no more than six or seven families, but at the time their opinions had a sizable impact on a tiny population. While some pioneers alluded darkly to the “personal problems” that these families had brought with them, others spoke of them in retrospect as martyrs who were hounded out of town—the Adamses decided to go back to Pennsylvania, the Burtons returned to Illinois, and the Thompsons, Summertons, and Bilentschuks moved elsewhere in the Orlando metro region. Like many others who figure in this book and who have left Celebration, their names, like the unquiet dead,
are still on the bricks around the flagpole in Founders Park and in front of Town Hall.

  Whatever drove them, individually, to leave, a ruinous decision was made by the developer to hush things up. TCC agreed to help these families sell their homes on condition they sign a confidentiality agreement amounting, essentially, to a prohibition against speaking to the press. Inevitably, the existence of the gag order became public, generating a new round of bad publicity for Disney and confirming some residents’ worst fears about the company’s controlling instincts. Despite the public embarrassment, the spirit of the gag order was not entirely lifted; as the teachers were preparing for their second year in the trenches, they were “advised” by TCC’s communications officer not to speak to reporters. In the interim, the Wall Street Journal had spoken, running a stinging frontpage article about the school’s troubles.1 While Celebrationites were learning to disregard the press, Disney’s executives and major stockholders could hardly ignore what the Wall Street Journal had to say.

  Media reports had interpreted Disney’s heavy-handed response to this early crisis as a confirmation that the company’s interests would ride roughshod over the liberties of residents. From the outset, outsiders took great pleasure in viewing Celebration as a company town in civilian clothing. Yet I found, to the contrary, that these events had jumpstarted the engine of civil debate among townsfolk, and set the machinery of opinion into motion more rapidly than any formal political process might have done. Since there was no provision in the town for public assembly or representative political opinion, and since the press was so heavily mistrusted, the town lacked a designated forum, for at least the next two years, for focusing the debate about the school. But a Pandora’s box had been opened, and the messy outcome served to politicize the community, early and abruptly. These first loud disagreements not only marked the end of Celebration’s microscopic age of innocence but also determined that the school would be the chief medium for registering opinion in town. As in the nation at large, when Celebration’s parents recorded their general dissent with the way things were, they would invariably use the school to do so. Since it was in the public domain, the school was considered a legitimate target of public discussion, unlike, say, the problems with housing construction, which lay in the private domain. Besides, the response of Adams and others, however intemperate and ill-timed (“We were promised caviar, what we got was dog biscuits”)2 established the perception that there might be something “wrong” with the school. Henceforth, open season would be declared on its teaching staff, their methods, and their educational credentials. Many of the “positive” parents got fed up waiting for their “world-class” school and found themselves in the opposing camp a year and a half later, pleading for a more traditional curriculum.

  ON THE FAULT LINE

  The first task, however, was to repair the damage, or, as Brent Herrington put it, to “prevent scar tissue from forming, and dividing the community.” Margo Schwartz, one of the founders and first officers of the Dream Team (who would later become a fierce critic of the school), confirmed that the actions of the “negative parents” prematurely created solidarity among the new residents: “Rich Adams brought us together,” she explained. Rosemary Cordingley, a parent on the other side, who pulled her son from the school but stayed in town, put it another way: “These events made the town real.” Schwartz, a former teacher herself, from Maryland, was typical of the pioneer cadre that ran the Dream Team, the embryo of the PTSA. Few were outright boosters, and most had their own concerns about the educational methods but thought they could best be met by getting involved, rather than by sniping from the sidelines. Stuart Devlin, a retired Long Island fire chief and two-term Dream Team president after it became the PTSA, saw the organization as a potential “conduit for correcting the flight of the plane,” and ran it accordingly. By contrast, the first president, the more loyalist Cyndy Hancock, had described it as a “support group with no political role to play.”

  The most immediate need was to improve communications between the school and incoming residents, many of whom seemed not to have gotten the right idea about the school. It was perceived that TCC’s housing sales agents, some of whom had transferred from selling Disney vacations and time shares, had been ill-equipped to educate prospective home buyers about the school’s nontraditional curriculum. So, too, the crisis at the school had fractured lines of communications with parents, and created a siege mentality among teachers that would assume an air of permanence over time. Many felt personally attacked and became overly defensive to the point of insularity. When the education gurus—the Johnson brothers and the Project Zero people from Harvard—were flown in for an instructional meeting with the parents to dissipate the first crisis, several of the teachers who were present felt neglected and professionally slighted. The Ph.D.s commanded respect from the assembled parents that the grunts in the classrooms could never expect to earn. Teacher turnover would be brisk during the first three years, despite the support efforts on the part of the “positive parents.” In the course of my year—the school’s second—an extensive program of education about the teaching methods was launched by the PTSA Dream Team’s communication arm and by the school’s second principal, Dot Davis—a formal, firm-headed Alabaman with a genteel bearing who had taken on the one job in town that no one coveted.

  The campaign to communicate the school’s mission and methods was arduous for all involved, but it felt like a Sisyphean task for teachers especially. Teacher-parent meetings I attended in several neighborhoods were dominated by exasperated complaints (usually from male parents) based on badly digested information or opinion. Seemingly oblivious to the reasoning behind the teaching methods, parents posed the same questions again and again: “Why aren’t you teaching my son the basics?” “How is he going to know your basic history, your basic geography?” “Who’s teaching my child to diagram a sentence?” “Isn’t there a better way of evaluating their work?” “How do I know if my daughter is a B or a C student?”

  Among all the residents I talked to, there were few who did not reiterate several of the many half-truths in circulation throughout the community. The most common of these wedded together expectations drawn from traditional education with misconceptions about the new. Our children are being held back because of the multi-age groupings; are not getting the basics, especially in math and science, because of the integrated curriculum; are getting the wrong ideas about authority because discipline is virtually nonexistent in the “chaotic” classrooms; are not being challenged because of the lack of competitive incentives; are not being prepared for the rigors of testing that will determine their careers; are unlikely, without grades, to get very far with college admissions; are less interested in being “friends” with their teachers than in learning something from them; are not motivated enough to choose or determine their own education; are simply not learning as much as they were at their last school. Among the openly antagonistic, there was much talk about research showing the “failure” of some of the progressive methods, while others were routinely described as fads. Celebration was ploughing ahead at a time when every state in the nation, it was alleged, was backing off from the changes implemented in the wake of the reform movement. Even Brent Herrington, a “positive parent” by dint of his office, acknowledged to me that the school was “pretty far-out for Middle America.”

  In the course of the year, children, some of them from prominent families in town, were pulled sporadically from the school. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, the previous administration had let it be known that “this school is not for everyone.” More than anything else, this formulation made parents livid. Public education, after all, is supposed to be for everyone, and there were few alternatives for families who had exhausted their credit on their homes in order to be assured of a Celebration education. They felt they had been promised a “public school, with a private school education,” and had not budgeted for private school fees. Disgruntled chatter
dominated the town’s dinner party conversation, street-corner talk, and phone time. In time, individuals made loose attempts to organize the opposition. In December, Joseph Palacios, one of the school’s most outspoken opponents, brought together a posse of the dissatisfied parents under the aegis of a meeting for a MENSA group, established for the purpose of getting access to a town facility. At this point, most parents were still too nervous at the prospect of being blacklisted in some way if they called for an open forum. But the covert nature of the MENSA meeting alerted the School Advisory Council (SAC) to the desire for a public forum about the school, and in January SAC scheduled the topic for discussion at its monthly meeting.

  People I knew well in Celebration were amused by my passion for SAC. Among the many groups whose meetings I attended regularly, I never tired of listening in on the council’s deliberations. On one occasion, during a slow meeting, Jackson Mumey, a council member, gestured toward me. “Look, Andrew is over there, taking his notes, and there will be a chapter in his book about this, so let’s pay attention.” SAC was nothing if not attentive to the media and outsider opinion in general. The council, representing parents, businesses, teachers, and students, functioned like a think tank on the school’s behalf. Notwithstanding its minifactions, SAC often felt like the Praetorian Guard, recruited to protect some inner sanctum of power. Councils like SAC are mandated by the state to guarantee public involvement in the school system. They do so by advising the principal, evaluating decisions about the allocation of funds, and administering a self-assessed school improvement plan. By its second year, SAC had attracted many of the major players in town, who clearly viewed it as a power forum. Its membership was largely male, compared to the predominantly female participation in the PTSA. The PTSA’s mass gatherings were informational and inspirational. SAC’s much smaller meetings were quite polemical, featured verbal sparring contests, and they occasionally took a philosophical turn.