What We Make Our Own
Once, as a new teacher back in 2007, I was walking down the upper-school hallway as classes were going on. A group of girls were talking loudly and laughing walking toward me near the drinking fountains, while a man stood on a ladder changing the long, fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. As I prepared to confront the students and find out why they were not in class, the man on the ladder called out to one of the girls by name and brusquely told her to be quiet and get to class. I marveled at how intimate the school must be that the maintenance man knew all the students by name and was comfortable taking on these sorts of disciplinary tasks. Later that week, when telling Mr. Carpine this story, he laughed and told me that the man on the ladder was the girl’s father. He had had a couple of hours to spare before going to work and asked if there was anything he could do to help out. He had intended to do elementary reading groups, but they had all the volunteers they needed. Mr. Carpine had jokingly told him he could change lightbulbs, but the man told him in reply that he was happy to do it.
In the early years of Ridgeview, many of the positions that are now staffed were covered by volunteers. Maintenance, janitorial, IT work, teaching assistants, shoveling snow, creating costumes and sets, chaperoning, organizing elementary parties, running the copiers and managing the resource room, grading routine assignments, and much else were not paid positions, but opportunities for volunteering. In twenty-one years, Ridgeview has moved away from what we once described as the “mom and pop vibe,” and become increasingly professional as we paid employees to handle nearly all of these tasks. As an organization, we have gained something for all of that, but we have also lost some of our intimacy and connectedness as a community.
Parents understandably lament what has transpired in district schools across the country over the last seventy years. They have slowly been pushed out and the professionals, bureaucratized, certified, and largely unionized, have moved in to decide what children will learn about history, citizenship, government, morals, music, art, sex, and religion. Where things have gone awry, frustrated parents have met with unresponsive or haughty boards of education. The schools themselves are immense, staffed by individuals they do not know and have shared no time with. This has been increasingly answered in the charter world with schools that are little more than corporations run as de facto for-profit operations. In these organizations, those at the top need never meet the parents or the students they educate, and the money they are able to rake in as a percentage of each school’s taxpayer provided enrollment permits them to live a very lavish life.
Spending time at a school, not as a mere spectator of events, but as an unassuming man or woman in the hallways, helping to sort out pencils, chatting casually with teachers, helping students set up tents on an outdoor trip, preparing a meal, reviewing assignments, listening to students read aloud, or observing a class, makes parents familiar with the faculty, their personalities and idiosyncrasies, and provides them with a sense of the moral flavor and schoolwide morale. These experiences feed into the conversations they have at home as families, the sorts of concerns they raise with the administration and faculty; in short, what they take the time to participate in, they treat more fully as though it were their own. In the district or corporatist setting, things have to reach a fever pitch before parents are outraged enough to act, and then, it is usually without much consequence. The people who could bring changes are too well-trenched, their pockets too well padded to be responsive. It is reminiscent of a line from Sinclair Lewis, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Their allegiance is to a better organized union or a more consequential group of investors. A small school, staffed with intellectually curious and able teachers and administrators looking to know their students and make an impact on their lives, and supported in this by parents willing to make the small sacrifices to stay involved, can address and manage challenges as it meets them and make and preserve the school as what it was intended to be: ours.
In the charter world, the talk is almost always about autonomy. Autonomy is important, but it is not principally a thing to be legislatively secured. If seventy years ago, parents had had the wherewithal and foresight not to believe that they could hand over control of education for their children to so-called professionals and only step in when those at the helm appeared to color outside of the lines, this project would still be more social than governmental, and we would not have run so badly and ideologically amok.
If we wish to preserve our independence and our autonomy, it begins with our own membership. There is no substitute or alternative for being involved. That is admittedly harder for some than others, but there continue to be opportunities for all. I encourage every parent to find a way each month to give a handful of hours to better knowing Ridgeview and its mission, its people and most of all its incredible students. We need not be the man in the hallway changing lightbulbs, but we can be the parent helping with reading groups, managing traffic in the parking lot, chaperoning trips to the mountains or museums, cleaning smocks in the art room, or sewing costumes for the plays. What we want to keep our own, we first have to make our own, and we are all fortunate to be a part of something as remarkable and as impactful as Ridgeview. Its continuance and preservation is eminently worthy of our time.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
