SHOESTRING SCHOOL

Reprint from The Journal of Orgonorny

by Mary Leue

 

Commentary:

 

This article appeared in the May, 1977 Issue of the Journal of Orgonomy, the Reichian journal which publishes the work coming out of the College of Orgonomy. Its editor, Dr. Elswotth Baker, was one of Reich's most sensitive and loyal colleagues, and was the one chosen by Reich to carry on his work. I consider it an honor for my writing to have appeared in this publication. The story of how that happened is perhaps significant, both for my outlook at the time and for Dr. Baker's as well.

 

In 1975 and 1976, 1 was still sort of entranced by Reich. I had just finished over two years of orgonomic therapy with Mort Herskowitz in Fhiladelphia, and was feeling wonderfully sane and full of energy! I had built an accumulator and was dying to know whether or not the cloud-buster was for real. That thing (and the work of Reich himselfl) sure seems to attract nutty people. It's only now that I can took back and acknowledge how nutty I was. Anyhow, I drove to Rangeley from my family's house in Brunswick, Maine, where we were vacationing, arriving at Orgonon, Reich's observatory and laboratory on the mountaintop, just as the Rosses, the caretakers, were leaving for lunch. They asked me to wait till they got back. Well, I was very excited, a bit scared and also very curious in a naughty kid sort of way, and ran up the driveway to the top shortly after the pickup drove out of sight.

 

In those days, the huge, science-fictiony cloud-buster was still hooked up to its well beneath the platform. I cannot tell a lie! I turned it on, and sat down to wait, my heart pounding wildly. In about a minute or two, a wind came up, and suddenly, I saw two blue holes in the grey overcast! Whew! Even scareder, I quickly put the whole thing back down, ran down the driveway, and had just closed the door of my car and was sitting sedately behind the wheel as the pickup came down the road again! So far, so good. But I couldn't keep it to myself, so I wrote Neill about it. He sent my letter on to Baker - quite properly! That thing can be damned dangerous, and I didn't know what I was doing!

 

So next thing I knew, I got a letter from Baker saying Neill had written him, and asking me who I was, how I happened to have written Neill. Well, I answered, mentioning my orgonomic therapy and describing the school in some detail. That's when he wrote back and asked me to write the article on the school which follows. I was very touched and pleased that he had been able to pick up my style.

 

The writing took a year, partly because of my lack of organizational ability with articles, but also because Lois Wyvell, then the managing editor, took it upon herself to revise it for me, on several grounds, including organizationi So I only take partial credit for the result. I should perhaps add that Lois was and is a stickler for orthodox Reichian doctrine, and so, several times asked me to reformulate some of my descriptions of our ways of doing to fit a more "Reichian" vocabulary than the one I ordinarily use. I hope the reader can see through this filter to the reality of what was going on at the time.

 

1977: "Shoestring School" is the name given us by a reporter whom I had asked to do an article on The Free School. It was not exactly designed to further our enterprise! But in the seven years of the school's precarious existence in Albany's South End, a poor, mixed Italian and black neighborhood, such experiences have been common. Strive as we might (and have!) for recognition and funding from various sources, somehow we aways seem to fall between all stools. Rather than actually suffering rejection by the general public, the recurring pattern is lack of recognition because of a dearth of easily recognizable categories in which to pigeonhole our school.

 

I have come to believe that this relative lack of "success" in financial and status terms has played a very important role in our school's development by forcing us to become increasingly flexible and resourceful as a means of survival. It may indeed be that our most valuable offering to the children and their families is this very quality of learning how to survive, and to survive well and fully, on terms society has never fully recognized.

 

Our school was founded in 1969 as a way of offering children a life-positive alternative to the public schools of Albany, New York. Having five children of my own, I had become acutely aware of the devastating effect these schools were having upon my two youngest children and their friends. We began with our children meeting in my own house. At the end of that school year, the children and I made a serious decision to expand our efforts and invite in families who would and could pay for their children's schooling, and to rent a building to house the enterprise.

 

The story so far could be duplicated indefinitely in places all over the country where alternative schools, to some degree resembling A. S. Neill's Summerhill, were being established during that time in our country's history when hope and bitterness mingled in a flush of foolish romanticism and equally harmful institutionalism.

 

Two unlikely factors in our case made a significant difference in the story of our little institution. One of them was my choice of the inner city as the site for the school. The other factor was that Bruce Loveys, a young man in his late twenties who had become disillusioned with public school teaching, elected to join our enterprise. We had compatible views of life and learning, and considerable experience with the actualities of teaching, and we also shared a passion for institution building. Our character structures meshed in such a way that each of us has functioned to enhance the strengths and correct the biases and failings of the other. So our little community has had both a "father" and a "mother" who are not rigidly authoritarian. I believe our school and our community are as good an example of "work democracy" (to use Reich's term) as one could find.

 

Let me first describe the atmosphere of the school, what a visitor would experience walking through our door. The building itself is old and drab, just as the reporter said it was, in spite of our efforts to paint the walls gay colors and decorate them freely with children's multicolored drawings. The floors are usually pretty messy. Our chicken coop smells pretty stinky. So do our mouse cages. There are quite a few rickety pieces of furniture around, as well as some sturdy ones, so there is an air of relatively advanced dilapidation, except for the kitchen. which is always immaculate. But the children!

 

Before school starts every morning, kids wander around in pairs, heads together, absorbed in some private conversation. Others talk excitingly with one or another of the teachers about something, while others feed the animals. Some run and chase. Others climb and jump, over and over. The place is a beehive! All morning long, children and adults are busy, busy, busy. There is much touching, sitting on laps. hugging, many heads bent over some project, book, or puzzle, a lot of excited conversation, kids teaching multiplication tables to one another, writing on the blackboards together, figuring things out together, teachers part of most little groups, but only one member, not a leader.

 

Lunch is a daily EVENT. Everyone interested in what everyone else is eating. Much trading of food. Much going up for seconds. Much conversation about the adequacy of the seasoning. A social event par excellence. After lunch, again the little groups assemble, some doing crafts work, or carpentry in the woodshop, or mini-tramp, or watching a movie downstairs, or climbing our mulberry tree in the back yard. or swinging on the swing. Or just sitting and watching everyone else. If John Dewey is right, that a school is not a preparation for life but is life itself, then we are a school. We are certainly a place of life!

 

The Children and Families Served

At present, we have forty children in school, about evenly divided between pre-school and elementary school age. The mixture of middle and lower-class children is about even, and, racially, they are remarkably evenly proportioned among white, black, interracial, and Hispanic. Over half come from the immediate neighborhood of the school. The rest we bus in. I suppose the reason I consider this remarkable is the fact that none of this distribution was planned in any way. We accept anyone who wants to come, adult or child. It just happened.

 

About one-third of our families pay some tuition, although for some this is a very small token amount. A few have been with us since the beginning, but it has been only within the last couple of years that we have learned how to help parents understand us well enough to trust us with their children for more than two years. Since the process we envision for our children entails three or more years, it is very gratifying that the trend is in this direction.

 

To give a clearer picture of our impact upon the children and their families, perhaps an example would help. Four years ago, we accepted Joscelyn L., age three, into our pre-school department. Her mother is Sicilian-American, her father black. Joscelyn has four siblings. At the time, her two older siblings were enrolled in a parochial school. The following year, the mother asked us to enroll John Boy, age eight, and Tina, age seven, in our school, having been told that unless she could pay tuition, her children could no longer go to the parochial school. We accepted them. The following year, Stephanie, age two and a half, Joscelyn's younger sister, was enrolled, and the year after that. her brother Tony, also (almost) age two.

 

The reason for the early enrollment of the latter two children is significant. Stephanie had a whole cluster of problems including chronic diarrhea, high lead level, severe strabismus, severe speech impediment, possible retardation, poor dietary habits, poor resistance against infection, head lice, worms, and general evidence of neglect. Tony was just out of the hospital for refusal to eat, dehydration, and strong suspicion of "retardation. autism, infantile schizophrenia or brain damage," diagnoses made by a whole battery of doctors whose findings were nonetheless vague and not definite. The two older children were considerably behind in their grade placement in reading and resisted our efforts to help them. The mother, Gloria, was at her wits' end, having been unable to get enough money to support her family, since her husband, a construction worker, was out of work most of the winter, not being a member of the union.

 

Having been turned down by the welfare department. she could find no legitimate work. During that winter, she would come into the school several times a week with various injuries - black eye, broken foot, broken arm - either inflicted by her husband or acquired when she fell downstairs while intoxicated. She spent most of her energy that year struggling to stay on top of her life, not to be drowned by it. We played an important role in that struggle.

 

Four years later, this family is still together, although they still have terrible battles when things get tough. John Boy reads well and with pleasure, and has become a competent, strongly self-respecting member of our community. He, among the few long-term kids in the school, plays the role of natural leader when decisions are in order at our council meetings. His art work is the pride of the school. Our new school flag is his design. Tina's chronic rage has begun to ebb, and she has finally begun taking pride in her work, which has improved considerably. Joscelyn, for several years totally unable to learn, has suddenly opened up and begun to gallop through her classes.

 

Stephanie, now five, is in many ways the most appealing member of the family. Her "gik, gak, gook" talking has vanished entirely except in moments of extreme stress. Her eyes only go askew when she feels "put down." Most of the time, she looks right at you. Her sense of humor is delightful, and her sense of herself is tremendous. She herself gets as much pleasure in contemplating her "former self" as any of the rest of us. Her whole face sparkles; her blue eyes dance with fun. She jigs and dances her way through the day. and has already begun to take an interest in school. Her health is excellent. Her hair, once straw-like and crusted, is now shiny and clean. Her plate is always polished at the end of each meal. She is a great kid, and very motherly toward younger kids, which I suppose is her way of redressing the off-balance mothering pattern she has experienced in her family.

 

Tony, now nearly four, has presented a more difficult problem, one on which we have been working very hard with considerable success considering its enormity. At the age of two, for several weeks, he refused to eat or even to drink from a bottle, so he had to be hospitalized. Since then, we have travelled a long road together, working hand-in-hand with several community agencies. Tony goes to an "early learning center" in the morning, where he receives training in the patterned behavior and experiences which he lacked: first, creeping, manipulating various toys, and clapping his hands; then, walking. climbing, eating solid food, responding to various signals. and finally, feeding himself with a spoon and imitating sounds. We give him the same kind of experiences in the afternoon.

 

It has been necessary to train him to make these responses because his only spontaneous responses had been either self-stimulating (rocking, waving his hand in front of his eyes and watching the visual patterns it made, or listening to rhythms and keeping time to them) or self-punishing (slapping himself on the side of the head and screaming). Although he is now comfortable in walking around, even running a bit, rather like a little wind-up toy, and even occasionally offers a verbal response spontaneously, everything he does still has a robot quality about it that sets him apart from the others. He does enjoy life a great deal, however, and obviously understands what we say to him.

 

His sense of joy and tragedy are extreme, so his life is anything but boring! His face will sometimes light up with the most ecstatic smile I have ever seen. His laugh is totally catching when something tickles his fancy, and when he is angry or frightened, his howls can be heard for blocks. Whether he will ever attain much more than a very elementary level of functioning is questionable, however.

 

The mother still flies into fits of uncontrollable rage, usually set off by some suspicion that one of her children is being mistreated. I well remember one episode last winter when she came into the school roaring in a voice audible over the entire school that someone had hidden her son's coat. She flew at me when I tried to tell her that he himself had lost it, and began pulling out my hair and hitting my head against the wall. I managed to keep my cool until her rage subsided enough for her to listen to me and to pull herself together again. She was then able to cry, and flnally to tell us what had been happening that day, and I was able to give her comfort and affection.

 

Since she lives her life in a way that makes anger virtually unavoidable, this rage is a chronic problem, and she pays heavily for it, suffering from severe high blood pressure. At least she knows that no one in the school will take reprisals against her for giving way to it, and she knows also very well that her children are thriving with us. So we consider the relationship a good one. When she is too angry to be effective, we also function for her as an ombudsman with various agencies with which she has to deal. For the past year, the rage seems to have been less uncontrollable. so we believe she, too is changing gradually.

 

This family is by no means unusual in the number of problems that beset it. The details are different, but the destructive effect of the environment is universal. It is humbling to us that so many poor people are able to retain as much humanity as they do in the face of such adverse conditions. Chiefly, we are grateful when one of these severely stressed families will allow us to play as decisive a role in helping them to turn themselves around as this family has done. It does not always happen.

 

Schooling - Formal Classes and Other Learning Experiences

We have at present around forty kids from the ages of a year (one baby) to fourteen (a boy who has just graduated). We have a full program covering the entire pre-school through elementary school curriculum, with provisions for remedial work where required, so that all of our kids learn to operate academically at or above their grade level. We take formal education very seriously and judge our relative success as a school first and foremost in terms of our success in helping kids learn to read, write, and cipher. We are visited every year by School Board representatives, who always leave very pleased.

 

The formal learning of academic skills takes place in the morning in class settings. Kids and teachers alike determine which students go where. Once a week, the teachers hold meetings to review the progress being made by the children and to make recommendations for possible changes, but any proposed change comes about only with the approval of the people involved. We follow the general notion of individual progress by each child at his own rate and more or less in his own way, if he prefers one way over another.

 

We bring in as rich a variety of "ways," both of materials and experiences, as we can find. Kids help with cooking and learn to shop for food in the grocery store and to read recipes as well as to figure out amounts of food necessary to feed fifty people and to prepare that food in palatable form and on time. These activities flow back into the formal process and enhance it. Since we have finally become eligible for free textbooks on loan from the city, we now offer kids a rich variety of very attractive reading books, since the term "textbook" includes any book one might use to encourage reading, as well as actual textbooks.

 

Competence in the playing of various social roles is the chief incentive we offer, and the formal skills are a means to that end, as well as being a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Thus, we offer "licenses" for such proficiencies as animal husbandry or cooking, and as mimeograph operator, movie projectionist, or wheel potter. The standards for these licenses are consistently high, and their acquisition is a serious matter. The rewards in the way of recognition and a feeling of responsibility are equally high, and the kids take them very seriously and work hard to get them. We put out a weekly newspaper at which the kids work hard too. The number of seven- and eight-year-olds who can read on a fifth- or sixth- grade level and know their multiplication tables, who can cook a meal or take complete responsibility for our chickens, rabbits, mice, and our boa - and generally function well and responsibly, is well above the average for most schools, I am quite sure.

 

In addition to the usual offerings of a progressive school environment - color, pattern, manipulative media, pets, paints, blocks, toys, dolls, climbing, running, balancing, and nestbuilding equipment - we offer the children an opportunity to work through their encounters uninterrupted by adults (except on rare occasions when it is evident that there is mutual lack of contact) . They wrestle, challenge one another verbally, develop all sorts of coordination skills, use tools, and generally take responsibility for a wide variety of roles. They sign up for afternoon activities with the teacher who is offering the activity that appeals to them. Some dance or do tumbling or trampolining or wrestling, while others go for walks or trips around the city. Others climb trees, swing, play in the sandbox in the back yard, or go to the playground in the park. Once every month or so, the whole school will go on an outing together - say, into the country to pick apples in an orchard or to a picnic in the park, or tobogganing in the snow. Or sometimes the big kids will go to a nearby farm for a few days, a farm where we have a standing invitation to use a converted barn to sleep in, animals to be taken care of, wilderness to tramp in and wild life to learn about.

 

If we had the luxury of an entire childhood within which to operate, as Neill did, we might not set up priorities for academic skills so stringently, but of this, I am not so sure. Neill established voluntarism as his first principle, in my opinion. In Summerhill, one never forced a child to do anything he doesn't want to do. Well, that sounds fine. And neither do we! But when you try to translate such a principle into actual community mores and rules of conduct, what you end up doing is firing the hold-outs who won't give in voluntarily, the incorrigibles. If we tried to do that, we'd have no school to speak of. Oh, we've sent kids home for a few days to think things over, and once, we even sent a girl to another school for three months to find out what the "real world" was all about, so she could choose where she wanted to be. But we have never just told a kid, "Get out and don't ever come back!" Rather than put that onus onto a kid, we would prefer to intervene in the child's life to set limits to his behavior. And we don't equate that setting of limits with enforcement of adult management of the child's choices. Perhaps that's what Neill meant by "freedom, not license."

 

There is a middle-class "open school" in Albany that patterns itself on Summerhtll in following an inviolable rule of never tolerating active intervention of any sort in the lives of the children, They see such intervention as "violating their space," and they view us as virtually antichrist where children are concerned because we do not adhere to any such ideological stand. And I do believe it is an ideological stand. We do not "advocate" intervention any more than we condemn it, because we do not function ideologically but try to find out what the real needs are in every case and respond to those needs in whatever way seems most appropriate.

 

We have gotten three or four kids from this "open" school who in our opinion were behaving in deeply disturbed and disturbing ways, being either self-destructive or destructive of the rights of others. We have had no hesitation in intervening in such behavior. It is our belief that adults need to play a very active role in the lives of children and that children get most of their values from the adults they are with. Too many adults are afraid of playing an adult role, and too often the result is that the kids believe the adults simply don't give a damn what they, the kids, do!

 

We do maintain an attitude of non-intervention between kids or between a kid and an adult, however, when interaction, not "acting-out," is taking place. The rest of us take it for granted that, when two persons are at odds, this interaction is meaningful to the two involved, and we try not to take sides. We in no way discourage two people who have a problem from having it out on whatever terms they choose, even if those terms sometimes become physical, and even if one is an adult and the other a child. Naturally, we do not condone adult violence against a child, any more than we do between children when some sort of unfair advantage is involved or if one is an older or stronger child. It is, amazingly, rarely necessary for us to intervene between two children because one of them is in such a berserk rage as to endanger the safety or life of the other child.

 

We find that, in the long run, children learn to work out non-violent solutions to their sense of injury at the hands of another child far more rapidly and fully when not stopped from having a go at him in the beginning. It is as though they can give up actual physical combat when they know they can resort to it in a pinch. I often wonder if the violence of our society is not largely a compensation for a feeling of inner helplessness from never having discovered how fully capable one is of a good self-defense. Even the most helpless, mamma-oriented child will turn at long last and defend him or herself when he finally realizes no adult is going to come to his rescue. Our kids' general self-confidence level, their spontaneity, their ability to throw themselves fearlessly into all activities, from tumbling to throwing a pot on our kick wheel, from wrestling to reading, is in proportion to their ability to defend themselves, verbally, emotionally, or physically.

 

Since so many of our families come from such overwhelmingly difficult circumstances, we have had to learn how to move the children as quickly as we can into a positive environment. We do not, for example, wait for spontaneous discovery in the reading program to set in. We have learned to surround kids with an extremely rich environment offering many choices of expressive media and stimuli for establishing contact as quickly and pleasurably as possible. Our low pupilteacher ratio (four to one) permits a great deal of individual work with the children. On the other hand, if a child clearly chooses not to learn to read - or chooses not to engage with any other school subject, this is not an issue for us. We respect the child's choice, and make effort to "go to bat" for him at home. Pressure to do good school work comes from home, not from us, and we struggle to keep the child's space open.

 

Funding

My inheritance of a relatively modest sum of money ($50,000) blessed our school at the outset with a viable economic base. First, we bought an old parochial school in the

Italian ghetto for $18,000 and then, for a total of $10,000, two inner city houses to serve as housing for the teachers and production of income. Since that time, for an additional $12,000 we have acquired three more city houses and a garage plus two lots of land adjoining the school property. I include these details regarding our financing to spell out for skeptics how much can be done in institutional terms with a relatively puny sum of money, provided the model for the institution is "organic" rather than externally imposed. By "organic," I mean growing from within in response to real needs rather than from pre-conceived ideas generated outside the actual situation.

 

After we had acquired our school building, we realized that the total budget on which we were operating, which was based on a charge of tuition from only those families who could afford it, barely covered the basic necessities of overhead and upkeep. Our first efforts, therefore, went toward raising additional funds. Teachers, children, and parents all worked hard putting on garage sales, candy sales, benefit concerts and so on. We also wrote grant proposals to a long list of agencies, both private and public, that fund schools like ours. But, increasingly, it became clear that if we were to survive, we would have to generate most of our own income and that these mighty efforts, which were consuming a great deal of our time and energy, would end by killing the very enterprise they were designed to benefit by taking the vitality away from our work with the children.

 

We also soon realized that, if we were to survive, we could not "hire" teachers in the way other schools did. After a year of struggling to do things as they were commonly done, we realized we were dying from an outlay none of us who worked in the school either wanted or had really asked for. As an employer, we had to pay the government lots of money in the form of withholding taxes, social security deposits and workmen's compensation. Not only that, but our real estate taxes for the property were strangling us, too. So our first retrenchment from the usual way of doing things was to stop: stop trying to raise money, stop paying salaries.

 

We then incorporated as a tax-exempt corporation, since we were an educational city resource. This process took two years but brought us, as a side effect, an on-going relationship with various members of the city government, including the mayor, a sense of presence in the community we might not have developed had we not had to struggle to achieve our goal of financial survival. A lot of schools like ours exist in both a social and political vacuum, and I believe their children suffer a similar lack of relatedness as a result. Ours know their place in the local scene, and take pride in the school's reputation. To my way of thinking, such an experience is worth a hundred courses in "civics."

 

We then began looking for an internally generated source of income which would make us relatively autonomous. We looked for funds with which to capitalize our corporate property holdings and raised a pretty good sum from a few interested people, which we then used to purchase houses near the school, most of them at county tax-delinquency auctions. During these five years, as our staff grew, we gradually rehabilitated one house after another and rented out apartments which now bring in half of our annual income.

 

The acquisition of buildings has been a gradual growth. The first houses we got were in good condition, but, later, as our staff increased and we needed more houses, we had to buy some in very poor condition, and our combined skills as renovators became important. At the present time (1976), we rent out eleven apartments in addition to the four we reserve for teachers, of whom we have- eleven full-time. The rented apartments bring us a net income of approximately $500 per month, which we supplement with our meager tuition and contributions income of roughly the same amount. On this budget we survive quite nicely, paying a few teachers pocket money from time to time, but mostly depending on them to generate their own as needed.

 

Like Mr. Micawber, we live in a state of complete happiness which stays perilously close to equally complete misery! But it works. We keep our bank balance above the red line and our energy flowing into the life of the school and the community which supports it.

 

Health-Exercise, Nutrition. and Prophylaxis

We have learned to take very seriously the issue of physical health and the prevention of disease. When your goal is to help children learn, they must be in a position to be present in school, both in body and soul, before that learning can take place. And increasingly, our experience has been that the problems which keep coming up and which prevent children from being open to the learning process are danger signals. Warning! Something is wrong! Do something! We try to remain sensitive to such signals and to do something about them.

 

A great many of the problems our families encounter have to do with poor health, poor nutrition, poor immunity to disease. We conduct a very thorough program of medical supervision and treatment on an on-going basis for all the children in the school, using a remarkably fine community health center that has a team system of delivery of health services, providing excellent continuity of care. We also give the children an excellent hot meal at noon, plus a mid-morning snack of fruit or crackers and cheese, which we are able to do thanks to the federal free lunch program. Further, we totally ban the eating of candy in the school and urge families not to give it to their children.

 

We also have daily exercises for fifteen minutes every morning, not so much for muscle toning as to help people wake up and come alive. Thus, we do mostly loosening-up and livening-up exercises, rather than straining ones. One very important thing we do is the eye and facial expressiveness exercises. It is amazing to me to see how many kids have eye blocks of one degree or another. When they do the "lion," for example, in which you protrude your eyes, stick out your tongue and make a loud noise, many children cover their eyes first in fear, as though they feel unprotected. But whatever we do, we are very careful to keep our awareness on the significance of the experience and not allow any of the exercises to be used mechanically by either teachers or children. This requires real contact on the part of all who work with the children.

 

Over the years, the staff members have seen with increasing clarity the importance of maintaining contact with the children and one another. This I took on more and more as my primary function - to provide a kind of supportive back-up for people wanting to make the school a way of life, either temporarily. as in the case of students from Antioch and other colleges, or on a long-term basis.

 

Staff and Community

The most crucial ingredient in our continuing success has been the people who have chosen to invest themselves in our enterprise without thought of benefit to themselves in the world's terms, but only of the ultimate satisfaction of the work itself and the daily experience of being part of the adventure. Initially, there were just myself and Bruce Loveys. Bruce had his Master's degree in history and had taught in a consolidated high school for three years, and he was searching, as I was, for something that made more sense. Then, gradually, one after another came, saw, and stayed for the sheer love of the experience and the experience of love.

 

Bruce and I have long believed that a closed society is self-defeating in the long run. I realize that some schools, such as Summerhill and the Fifteenth Street School and Lewis Wadhams, have had to operate as closed societies in order to maintain their integrity in the face of intruders. With this point of view I have a good deal of sympathy, but I also believe that any school that systematically excludes any group of people is in danger of becoming stultified and tradition-bound in the course of time. In our case, this has never become a problem since there are so few people to whom our format and salary scale (zero!) appeal. For this reason, we very early adopted the attitude that we would accept any and all comers who wanted to work with us, both teachers and families.

 

We now have eleven staff members, plus part-time students on leave from the university. Our qualifications are impressive, including one Ph.D., two M.A.s, three teaching certificates, one B.A., one associate degree, two college students for whom the school is a part of their study course, and one woman from the neighborhood. Two of the staff are black, of whom one is also Puerto Rican. Five are men. Four teachers are also parents of children in the school.

 

Generally, no one is delegated in any formal way as the one who plays this role or that -say, the one who keeps track of dental appointments - as we tend to take on habitual roles as a personal choice. Some roles we do parcel out formally, however, such as the classroom teacher roles, and those of crafts teacher, cook, woodshop teacher, swimming supervisor, and movie projector operator, but all or any of these roles are either spoken for or are rotated so everyone takes his turn.

 

The teachers have weekly night meetings at which we work very hard at increasing and maintaining contact with all the dimensions of our roles and with one another. Then, for both staff and parents, we have an optional weekly four-hour group meeting devoted to encouraging the men and women to function in ever more loving and emotionally honest ways with one another. We encourage our teachers to seek monogamous sexual relationships as the best possible way of living sanely and humanly.

 

I have found that if one stays well within this primary criterion of contact, people seem to have an instinctive sense of what they can and cannot tolerate in terms of increasing that contact. Those who cannot tolerate the rise in anxiety voluntarily drop out, giving one excuse or another, and we let them go. I believe this way of doing things serves very well to effect a self-selecting staff.

 

Most of our staff are middle-class in origin, but I believe the terrible gap that ordinarily exists between teachers and students, especially in ghetto schools, is far less devastating in our community than in most. I suppose this is true mainly because we feel that the lower class culture, as opposed to the pathology to which poor people incline, and in contrast with the pathology of middle-class people, is healthier for children than the culture of affluence. We see more real love, concern, and matter-of-factness in regard to children among poor parents - in other words, more contact with life- than among middle class people. It may be that living in a society that allows people to define "the enemy" as out there, as tangible, allows families to turn their nutritive energies more inward among one another and their destructive energies outward toward the cold, cruel world.

 

The pathology of poor people - the intense, ever-ready hostility and suspiciousness, the physical violence, the lack of' willingness to postpone gratification. the deep self-hatred beneath the surface arrogance which protects from hurt - creates an unstable base for continuity of relationships. Yet somehow it gives us a chance to hold out our love and support in tangible ways that can be recognized by families, so there is created step by step a real sense of belonging one to another, which by far transcends the superficial sort of surface contact that is ordinarily the only kind that is possible among prosperous urban and suburban families. It is this hunger for real intimacy, real contact, which each of us learns to satisfy with one another, that creates a sense of real community.

 

When we began looking toward the community as a source of income. we also became members of the community in a real way and our attitude toward our role as a school came to include the community around us. We began playing a role in arbitrating disagreements between neighbors who either lived in our apartments or next door to them. As problems with children arose, it became necessary to work out ways of including parents and neighbors in finding solutions to those problems

 

The general attitudes of our neighbors toward us are intangible and difficult to assess in cause and effect terms, but I believe they are very real. We have worked hard to see to it that our children and our teachers treat our community with great respect. I do not believe it is simply my own wishful feeling that seem to sense less tension, more friendship and relaxed enjoyment of each others' company among our neighbors than was evident when we first moved into the community. More and more families whose children attend our school are finding ways to move close to our neighborhood so their children can enjoy the pleasure of a large circle of friends of all ages. Increasingly we are becoming a real village. More parents attend our monthly parents' meetings, at which we discuss very little of a formal nature, reserving that for twice-yearly conferences, but instead, simply enjoying getting to know each other, watch slides of the children, sip coffee, and generally socialize. In the beginning, it was the middle-class parents who came, and the lower-class ones who tended to stay away. Presently, it is more likely to be the other way around, ,although some middle-class parents do come regularly.

 

We have learned, too, to make good use of various social agencies that are available to us for solving problems, such as the federally funded community health center I mentioned above which offers such an extraordinarily high quality of health care of all kinds, as well as a number of state, county, and municipal agencies that offer supportive services to poor families, including child protective services, social services, and counseling services. And, once in a while, we even use such enforcement agencies as the police and the school and family courts. Such social agencies, we have found, at least in our city, operate with surprising humanity and personal involvement, and we have never regretted allowing any of them to play a role in helping us to help families turn themselves around from their habit of viewing themselves as helpless victims of society rather than as full members of it.

 

Conclusion

We are beginning to have a feeling of security, for each of the seven years has been less anxious, our staff has grown steadily larger, we have kept out of debt, everyone has been fed and housed not only satisfactorily but well, and we have developed a strong sense of commonality which has been a great source of strength to us all. In large part, I attribute the success of this daring venture to the sense of stability and good management brought to the enterprise by Bruce Loveys who, aside from his regular teaching has served as treasurer, bookkeeper, landlord, superintendent of buildings, and foreman of the maintenance crew, as well as taking a stint at bus-driving, cooking, and all the other chores we share around.

 

I feel that our school community fills a gap that exists for many people that is unfilled by any social agency or in ever-increasing degree by the family itself, and that this kind of role is an increasingly desperate and urgent need in our society. Our actual numbers are infinitesimal in proportion to the size of the need, but I sometimes hope that we may have something to contribute to a better understanding of how schools could help families to pull themselves up out of the morass of poverty to the mainstream of society. But whether or not this is the case, we who live together in our school live our lives with a great deal of joy and excitement. This experience is an end in itself.