Schools on Trial by Nikhil Goyal

Author:Nikhil Goyal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

Mercogliano noted that in recent years the school has doubled down on improving equity by strengthening student voices, diversity, and its relationships with public schools. She said they wanted “this to be an accessible school for all students and to really represent Brooklyn, and also be a school that is working with public schools and teachers and trying to own an identity about students having power in education…There is a lot of desire to work with public schools and a strong wish for public schools to be different.” But above all, the goal is to be a place where every student is “able to be their full selves” and “get to be who they are and who they want to be.”

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SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Jeff Collins went on a quest to find a school for his daughter where she would be engaged, treated with respect, and be able to choose what she wanted to learn instead of being told. He couldn’t find one, so he decided to start a school himself.22

Collins spoke with his wife and a few friends and formed a small founders group. He picked up some books on how to start a Sudbury school from the Sudbury Valley School Press. The founders group organized a meeting in their local town of Woodstock, New York, and put out a notice in the newspaper that they were starting a private school but refrained from revealing the details of what the school was going to be like. About one hundred people came to the meeting, and Collins spoke of a school with no grades, tests, homework, or mandatory classes—a place where the students were free to learn with few constraints.

“We found a few people who agreed entirely with our philosophy,” he recalled. “But there was skepticism to fear to downright hostility from some. ‘How can you do this? This is so dangerous to a child’s education’ or ‘This will damage a kid’s education. You aren’t teaching them all the things they need to learn to be a real person.’ ”

The first batch of parents who signed up for the school were those who really craved this type of schooling, wanted something different for their kids, or were trying to have their child leave the school he or she was currently in. Collins and his team swiftly received permission from New York State to start a school but had some trouble finding a building.

Finally in 2002, Hudson Valley Sudbury School began with sixty-five students in a building that had housed a local school administration office. Later, they discovered that the building wasn’t constructed properly and getting it up to code wasn’t worth the cost.

So the school closed down for a bit while a brand-new building was constructed, financed by Collins personally. In June 2004, they restarted operations unofficially in a trial run with twenty-five students. Then in September, they officially reopened with thirty-five students. More than a decade later, in the 2014–15 school year, enrollment hit eighty pupils. The maximum capacity for the building is one hundred students, and there are eight staff members.

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