To Start a School III
Welcome to this week’s issue of Traversing, as always if you find this newsletter to be interesting, if it helps to inform your thinking about progressive education or if you think it might help others, please subscribe, share it with your friends and neighbors and share your comments and questions.
To Start a School Part III
This week I am going to continue with some more thoughts on starting a school based on my experience opening City of Bridges High School. Last week I shared my first four thoughts, which you can find here and the week before I talked about a case study of The Circle School in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, which you can find here.
5. Read the fine print
The process of starting a school, just like starting any organization or institution takes time and involves knowing the regulations that are required in the state or country where you reside. City of Bridges High School is registered with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, is a 501(c)3 non-profit and meets the occupancy and zoning requirements for a school building in the state of Pennsylvania. We also have insurance, workers compensation and liability. We have payroll and with it the associated taxation and the list goes on…Each of these elements of our organizational structure required meeting and completing a different set of regulatory documents and licenses. This of course is not as fun as building the vision, or telling the heart story, but at the end of the day in order to make this type of project work, you need to make sure you are meeting the requirements of your region. I strongly suggest finding a good lawyer and accountant.
The fact that you cannot go it alone leads me to my sixth thought:
6. Build a team
The work of starting a school is complicated, time consuming, sometimes frustrating and also incredibly exciting, fun and enlightening. It is also a lot of work and you can’t really do it alone. I spoke last week about making friends, but this is a different thought, who are your team mates, what skills and dispositions do you need in order to support your strengths and enhance your areas for growth? It can be hard to find the right people to work with on this project, but it is a necessary step. I found that one of the most important things about members of the school team is that they are open to dialogue and growth in addition to believing deeply in the mission and vision for the school. City of Bridges staff have come from many different places and we have found each other in a myriad of different ways and without their hard work and compassion, we would not be where we are today.
Which leads to my seventh thought:
7. Be prepared to iterate, change and grow
Monday nights this semester I am teaching a curriculum class at Chatham University. This past Monday we were using human centered design to explore project and problem-based learning (I’ll write about both of these topics in future issues) and we were discussing the process of brainstorming, iterating, prototyping, and revising. Starting a school is at its core a human centered design process. This is especially true if you are starting a school which is different from other schools in your region. You certainly have a vision and a model that you are hoping to implement, but at the same time you are responding to the needs, interests and goals of the students and families that you are welcoming into that community. As a result, you have to be open to growing, changing and evolving in response to those needs, interests and goals. Transparency about the iterative process allows you to navigate the uncertain paths and directions that your learning community will surely take as it fits into the context of the place and of the people who have joined you on this journey.
The need for transparency leads me to eight and final thought (at least for now):
8. Communicate
The journey of starting a school will be hard, it will be scary, it will be at times filled with uncertainty. It will also be joyful, satisfying and at its best transformative. While on this journey, it is necessary to be in communication with everyone who is involved in this process. Talk with everyone, listen to their concerns and their triumphs. Share your ideas, changes in direction and questions that you have for your learning community. This can be hard work, as it takes time and invites criticism. That being said, the only way to grow and learn is be open to growth and to share the experiences that are motivating and driving the process of continual improvement. An esteemed colleague and member of our Board of Directors recently reminded our community that City of Bridges is a baby school. We have many years of growth and development and I hope that we always continue to grow and learn to become even more of what we can become.
This weekly newsletter is part of that process as I am striving to share our journey as well as the theories and practices that are the foundation for City of Bridges and dozens of other schools like it who are striving to demonstrate a more humane and learner focused model for teaching and learning.
I have had the honor of opening a number of schools during my career and the even greater honor of helping others start schools. I think the most important piece of advice that I have is to reach out to other people doing this work and ask them what they have learned along the way. I have avoided many pitfalls because others who began this journey sooner fell into them and steered me around them.
Next week I will shift to another topic, but if anyone who reads this newsletter ever wants to talk about the pits I didn’t fall into and the ones I stepped into blindly, please reach out.
With Gratitude
People, Places and Things
In this section of the newsletter I share people, places and things that have inspired and taught me valuable lessons about rethinking learning.
Last week’s People, Places and Things was posted on the same day that I took a group of City of Bridges High School to visit Oberlin College as part of our fall expedition week college tour trip. I won’t spend this ink on extoling the virtues of Oberlin College, although after the information session and tour, I was ready to enroll! (Full disclosure I already had this experience as I am an alumni of Oberlin) Instead I would like to talk about the experience of visiting colleges.
On our college tour we visited a number of different schools. Chatham University (full disclosure again(see above), I teach in Chatham’s education department), Duquesne University, Point Park University, Oberlin and the University of Pittsburgh. Each of the universities did a wonderful job sharing their school and they all offered different experiences while all being places where students could receive an excellent education.
The thing that was notable to me was those different experiences. The schools all have many of the same things, libraries, excellent faculty, athletic facilities etc. The schools also each have a different feel, culture and to borrow a word from my high school students, vibe. In all honesty the same can be said of elementary school, pre-schools, high school, organizations, and learning communities.
As a parent of a soon to be college student and as an educator this last week reminded me of the importance of spending time in a place. The guide books and videos provide a glimpse of what a place is like, but in order to know what somewhere is like you have to spend time there. Therefore, if you are looking for a school, a college, an elementary school, or a high school, including City of Bridges, give them a visit and get a feel for the vibe.
See you next week!