From School to Community (Part 2)
Having been refused by our three self-made millionaires, we had to look elsewhere for the money we needed. Actually, the neighborhood itself into which we wished to move provided us the solution to our financial problem. What was going on was a violent and destructive process among two groups, one a long-term, stable, and largely elderly Italian population, some first generation, most second generation, who had lived and raised their families in row houses they owned and kept up - and the other, an ever-increasing number of black welfare recipient tenants living in the row house apartments which had been sold to absentee landlords when their Italian owners grew prosperous and moved to the suburbs, leaving behind only the poor and the elderly. These black families, mostly single parent, had many children who were growing up largely unsocialized and unsupervised amid squalid neglect and despair as their mothers struggled to survive, moving from decaying building to decaying building, struggling to raise children with no parent support whatsoever, struggling with hostile and contemptuous welfare and clinic personnel, struggling to find momentary pleasures with black men who were themselves filled with despair and rage, struggling to defend the existence of their children by defending their behavior against all comers, no matter how delinquent or how inhuman that behavior might be. In other words, this was an armed camp, and battle lines were clearly drawn.
The advantage to us in this unfortunate, even tragic, situation was that the Catholic War Veterans as a group turned out to be such dedicated racists that they were determined to sell their building, even at considerable sacrifice, just so long as they could turn their backs on this neighborhood. We got a very good bargain. Additionally, in spite of the general policy being universally practiced by banks at that time of "red-lining" areas of the inner city they considered bad financial risks for mortgage investment, I did manage to find one sympathetic mortgage officer willing to take a risk with us. We had to do a lot of hurdle-jumping too complicated to go into, but the upshot of it was that the school was able to move out of the storefront we had been using for three months into our new building before the end of November.
Moving into this wonderful building gave us all a marvelous boost in morale. We began making all sorts of innovations in providing the children with low-cost or donated educational equipment, such as a four-foot stack of 3'x 6' sheets of a product called TriWall, a three-layered corrugated cardboard sheet akin in stability and strength to plywood but far easier and cheaper to buy and to build with. We made bookcases, cubby holes, children's climbing and stacking equipment, tables, stools - oh, loads of other things! Then a woman who had done some printing for us gave us an equally large stack of 3'x3' sheets of glue-backed, squared paper called MacTac, which we put to equally extensive uses! In fact, you might say that our school for a number of years ran on Tri-Wall/MacTac power - since we sure didn't have money!
Almost immediately, we began attracting new families, a process which was enhanced by the fact that we asked the newspapers to run a feature on us, which they did. Life in our new neighborhood proved to be at least as exciting as it had been in the old one. The black children living within a block of us began begging to come inside, even beating on the door to be let in (We still have the cracks in our door panels to show for it!). Middle-class white mothers shrank back from the assaults of these black children in terror, and a couple even took their darling little blonde girls out of the school, claiming that it was too chaotic for them, that their children needed more "structure," (nothing to do with race or class, of course). When we sent the neighborhood children home for permission to attend our school, most were refused.
The word seemed to have gotten around very quickly that we were "not a real school." So we decided to start a pre-school which they would recognize as "real," because it would be relevant to their need to find a cheap, reliable, and friendly place to leave their small children while they went to work. This we could do. Soon, we had a group of around eight three- and four-year-olds, mostly black neighborhood, with two mothers in charge. This took place on the second floor of our building, which really was ideally suited for the purpose.
But we still had our financial problem. It was quite clear that we could not expect to survive indefinitely paying teachers nothing, yet we were equally determined not to become a high tuition school. I didn't need salary, since my husband was a college teacher, but Bruce was cleaning offices after hours and on weekends in order to stay afloat, and his wife wanted to quit her job and have a baby, but felt she could not do so unless he could bring in a more reliable income. At this point, I bethought me of Jonathan Kozol's suggestion for solving this problem which he proposes in his book Free Schools (now reissued as Alternative Schools ): run a business! I began discussing the possibility of setting up a textbook sale company. Nobody wanted to do this, and I realized I didn't, either. But the idea of a business stuck with me.
I have always been attracted to houses, have always wanted to own several. Well, I found a wonderful three-story house for sale on the next street over from ours, owned by an Italian family disgusted with the deterioration of the neighborhood and well enough off to buy elsewhere. I bargained, and we got it. Now I had to get tax exemption from the city for this building. I went about gathering information on the hows and whos of setting up a non-profit corporation, and finally managed to get it accepted by the state. Non-profit status by the city was more difficult, but I finally managed that, too, thanks to a sympathetic attorney from the city's Office of Corporation Counsel. It took a couple of months of arguing toe-to-toe, but he finally gave in and let us have it! Within the space of about two years, we acquired four more buildings, one of them a garage next door to the school, one of them an abandoned building being auctioned by the county. All told, our six buildings cost approximately $40,000, most of which I fronted for the corporation, since we had been unable to find any other donors. This money I had inherited from my mother and my aunt, neither of whom had earned it, so I felt it only proper that this unearned money go into our project. I have never regretted this decision for one moment. That $40,000 is now worth at least $500,000 in the money of today and at today's real estate values for this area. I feel amply repaid by this knowledge! At the present writing (1986), they bring in over $4,000 a month in income, from donated space in apartments.
But having the buildings did more than provide us with a source of income. It gave us space to offer people who wanted to teach with us in lieu of salary. That and one hearty meal at noon, courtesy of the government's free and reduced price lunch, went a long way toward supporting them, and we were able to offer a small weekly supplement to eke out a fairly decent rate. We soon had three new teachers, all of whom had sought us out, agreed to our terms, and started right in. Additionally, we made a connection with Antioch College's work-study program, and began taking on a student teacher per quarter, and then two at a time. This was the height of the national preoccupation with "free schools," and what we lacked in expertise and experience, we made up for in excitement. By 1974, we had became a community of some thirty children and seven full-time teachers plus two or sometimes three part-time or student assistants.
Our challenge now became, and has continued to be, to become fully relevant to the families of the neighborhood who had only the public schools of the ghetto as an alternative to us, not just or primarily to the families of the children we had begun busing in from other parts of the city. The popular preoccupation with the idea that school can be a place children love for its own sake was secondary in the minds of these folks to a clear insistence that their children learn to read, write, and cipher. One thing we discovered early on was that it is a lot easier to recognize what is wrong with schools and even what changes need to be made than it actually is to do it successfully yourself with all comers - and since we now had a lot of pre-schoolers and elementary school children whose parents would be judging us solely by our educational success, we knew we had to do a far better job than the public schools - and our group was certainly as diverse and multi-problematic as theirs.
The goals of such parents all too often clashed head-on with those of their children! We found ourselves spending far more time teaching kids to deal justly with personal conflicts of all sorts than with the three R's, although our arts and crafts program was always excellent. We understood how educationally relevant this effort at the learning of self-government was, but on the other hand, we did not want to lose kids, and parents had begun letting us know how dissatisfied they were with this emphasis. Since we actually agreed, it was a struggle, because the kids themselves had natural priorities which were perfectly valid in their own terms, and had to be respected - and yet, we needed to teach skills as well as work straightening out tangled feelings and beliefs! Our council meetings at this time sometimes took several hours out of the day. Trying to mix social classes and diverse racial and ethnic groups on a genuinely peer basis is more difficult than it might seem. Or so we discovered. My approach to this issue included a strong belief that teachers themselves need to be very clear and straight in their thinking and stable in their emotions in order to deal with the demands made upon them by kids with great needs, and yet we could not afford to hire therapeutically trained teachers, nor did we wish to! Part of my belief was that our school had to be open to all comers, and that this needed to include teachers as well as families. This policy had its painful moments, although I believe it has worked very much in our favor over the long run. I remember one teacher we had early on who suddenly "broke" and picked up a black boy of around eight and slammed him onto the floor in great fury! Fortunately, the child was not hurt. Yes, there had been provocation, but such a reaction was intolerable - to him as well as to everyone else.
We set up a personal growth group which met every week for three to four hours, at which time teachers and others who wished to join could work through their hangups. This was in 1974. That group is still (in 1984) going strong, with eighteen members at present, seven of whom are originals. I believe the continued existence of this group has been the core of the continuing life of the school and of the community itself. We also have teachers' meetings, for attending to the working of the school,, but this other group is special. We have learned all sorts of ways of giving people support to make changes over the years, such as transactional analysis, Gestalt, re-parenting, Option, encounter, rebirthing, couples and relationship work.
The other benefit of having these buildings was that we began attracting families who wanted an apartment to live in, and who decided to let their children attend our school, usually because they found us friendly people to deal with in a very unfriendly world. In the process of rehabilitating our ten buildings for occupancy, we began to acquire a lot of skills - plumbing, wiring, sheet-rocking, carpentry, glazing, floor sanding, plastering, masonry, roofing, and so on.
Since most of our buildings were located on parallel streets, their back yards touched. When we had acquired them, these yards were filled with rubble, so we began clearing them out, planting gardens, and using them for socializing. Our properties had begun taking on more and more of the characteristics of a village, as we enjoyed our barbecues, birthday and holiday celebrations, and generally spending more time together.
One summer we had a barn-raising in the back yard of one of our teacher-families to get ready for a donated bred doe (female goat). Soon after, she gave birth to twin doe kids, and our serious farm-in-the city was launched! At present (1984) we have three does, the milk being shared by three families, a flock of chickens, who get fed mainly from the leftovers from school lunch, and bees.
Teachers who had come to teach with us as a novelty began seriously settling down and investing themselves in a more permanent and more monogamous pattern of living. The group became a kind of center for this new village which was coming into being, serving both to create a common ground of interest and to offer interpersonal support for dealing with the strains of getting through the hangups which divide people.
School families from farther away became attracted to this village atmosphere and began moving closer, either by finding a nearby rental apartment or by actually buying up an old or abandoned building. We found our rehabilitation skills very popular indeed, and began gathering to help one another in weekend "work parties," at which twenty of us would pool our efforts on one place, accomplishing rapid and low-cost miracles of building rescue and refurbishment. More and more, our streets became after-school and summertime "play streets," with the old Italian people serving gladly as built-in stoop supervisors of their activities.
By 1978, so many young couples who were connected with us in one way or another were getting pregnant and coming up against the up-tightness and cost of obstetrical care that I decided to organize a pregnancy and childbirth support group which would function both to help them find what they wanted and would also function as an advocacy group for more enlightened and liberal attitudes toward birth. From this beginning, we moved on to the setting up of a center in the basement of one of our buildings which offered medical and legal self-help education at no or very low cost to anyone who wanted to use us. We named it The Family Life Center. One of our reasons for doing this was certainly a need to solve the problem of the high cost of medical insurance for our school people, but the interesting thing was the fact that the more we worked with families to help them get what they wanted, the more we realized how revolutionary our concept was, and how much of a logical extension of the concept of a school which belongs to the families who use it.
It is my belief that the two institutions which create the worst feelings of helplessness on the part of families are the educational and the medical ones. A parent who runs into conflict with either of them can be seriously damaged, even jailed! People who accept the consequences for their children of the model of life on which these social institutions are based have no trouble they cannot handle, but if they cannot accept these beliefs and still have no other options, then they are going to feel bound into the larger society and hence to its rules. To belong to one of the clinics run by medically-insured health plans or to have group medical insurance necessitates a certain level of income, which insures that such people have medical care and effectively shuts out anyone else. A young couple wanting to have a baby is going naturally to assume the necessity of a certain level of income in order to pay for this child's medical care. But even this distinction of class doesn't touch the heart of the problem as I see it. The real problem is the extent to which our society robs parents and children of their autonomy, starting right at birth, and continuing on through childhood. The outcome is, or may be, good for the society (although I actually do not believe that it is), but it creates all sorts of problems for the recipients of the "system." I'm not laying all our social problems at the doors of the schools and doctors' offices, but I am saying that in having taken over the traditional teaching functions which once belonged to parents and neighbors, they are responsible by default for the fact that people grow up and have children without either proper personal or social support and information with which to play the roles.
There are other agencies we have thought up like the Money Game, a mutual investment group which enables people with low incomes to invest in bank savings plans usually available only to people who put in lots of moola, Matrix, a birthing center for which we find medical backup among doctors who favor midwife-managed birth, and Rainbow Camp, a summer recreation/camping/weekend workshop facility - a lodge on a small lake in the mountains near Albany which we have bought and use together..
Looking back at how we have developed our ways of governing ourselves, I suppose in the beginning I would have to say I had a lot to do with how decisions came to be made, because of having to get the school going the way I wanted it to go. It may be that this fact has led to our habit of seeking consensus on most decision-making that affects us all. I hate factionalism. Being a pretty decisive person, I guess the consensus tended to go more in the direction I wanted it to than not at first - but what that did was to discourage people who couldn't cope with my ways. Those who have stayed on are a very compatible and cooperative group of people who value autonomy as much as I do! Consensus defined in this way is not at all the "group mind" default process Dan describes so vividly. It is a way of grappling with problems long enough until their resolution in depth finally emerges. This is Quaker consensus, and is a function of true individualism.
The longer we have worked and lived with one another, the more we have come to respect one another and to value the process which leads to that consensus. We thoroughly enjoy one another's company, and spend a lot of time giving and going to one another's parties. We have had four weddings, and ten babies have been born to families in "the village." Because two of us are nurses, one having decided to take nurse's training after teaching in the school for eight years, we have been able to do a lot of labor coaching in the hospital with various school families, and have even done some home births - mostly with community families. The babies in the school who are between the ages of birth and two years seem to me a breed apart, so alert, outgoing, playful, active, and affectionate that it is a joy just to watch them together.
The school itself has changed very little in its overall composition over the twenty-two years we've been in the South End. For a while there were fewer black faces in the school as the neighborhood became increasingly "yuppyized," but we went out of our way to proselytize for the school in nursery schools, daycare centers and churches to let parents from the area know we exist - and the result in recent years has been, again, a very good mix of kids from white and black liberal middle class families and white and black poor families.
As we have learned more and more comfort and trust in our ability to teach how well what we do works, we have become more and more relaxed about academic skills, especially knowing that our graduates have fared as well as they have, whether or not they left us with their 3 R's well in hand! We never had put much emphasis on formal classroom activities anyway, but sometimes felt a bit guilty about it - so, since this discovery fitted our initial presuppositions about the nature of learning anyway, being able to live our convictions has allowed us to become a place of great universal joy and satisfaction! Our community kids, growing up in the village environment, going to the village school, learning with their friends' parents as their teachers, helping with farm chores - surrounded by people they love and who love them - are extraordinary human beings! Or maybe I am just prejudiced.
Well, I guess I am, at that. I remember one early fall evening a few years ago when I was walking down to a meeting that was being held at Betsy and Chris' house (a house that had originally cost $500 at auction and had been slated for demolition when the young couple took it on. I only wish you could see it now!). At any rate, as I turned the corner and started down the narrow, steep street on which eight of "our" houses are located, Ellen and Larry were just walking out of their half-done house with young Gabby perched on Larry's shoulders. Ned and Margaret were painting their new front steps and waved as we walked down the hill. Mickie peered out of her front window and gave a cheery hello. Howie, Nancy and Kaylana were working in their garden. Billy and Bridget were playing hide-and-seek with Kaleb from up the hill, and their mother was chatting with Edith on the front steps. Missie and Tyler were just rounding the corner from Elm St., and behind them ran Junie, scrambling to catch up. The golden evening light gave that village scene a kind of universal quality almost biblical in its feeling tone. That scene has stayed with me ever since. To me, the village has a special quality that makes it mine in a way nothing else can equal. It is home. It is life!
Well, at least that's what I believed, and wrote, in 1984. I've since had accept the fact that I needed to leave the community at the age of 79, to leave and go to live on family land with two of my kids' families. But again, that's well in the future, from the point of view of the narrative. For an extraordinarily long time - 28 years - it was indeed my "home."