The Journey From Student to Staff: Four Stories
As students grow at Alpine Valley School and other self-directed democratic schools, it's not uncommon for them to express a desire to return, only this time as an employee of the school instead. In this post, four Sudbury students who lived exactly that experience tell their stories and what they learned in the transition from student to staff.
Katy
Alpine Valley School - Denver, CO
My name is Katy Cure. I’m a former student, graduate, and current Staff Member at Alpine Valley School in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. I was a student at AVS from 2010-2017 and have been a Staff Member since 2019. As a student I was very interested and involved in the school’s systems (Judicial Committee, School Meeting, etc.) and surrounded myself with as much school sanctioned responsibility as I could get my hands on. As it would turn out, that would serve me well, even beyond my years as a student. Having an intrinsic understanding of how the school runs from a student’s perspective gave me a space to spend more time and energy learning the responsibilities and roles of staff while still being able to participate in the community.
At the beginning of my final year as a student at AVS I found myself in the same position as the majority of my fellow graduates have reported during the same time. I felt a sort of disconnect, not coming from the community, but rather coming from within myself, that signaled to me (as it had for many others in their final year) that my time at school was coming to an end. That I had done all I could, and all that I had come to do. That the school, as safe and comfortable as it felt, was a place that I could progress no further in my current state. So, upon this realization, I made the decision to pursue a diploma and end my time as a student at AVS.
The following years I was faced with a version of the world that I hadn’t encountered yet, an adult world that I was hesitant to enter, but felt supported by this foundation from the amazing Staff Members at AVS, that I could solve my own problems as they arrived, as I had for the previous seven years. When I received a call that AVS was looking to add another Staff Member, I jumped at the opportunity to help, in part, instill this same comfortable sense of confidence onto the future generations of AVS students. The adult world would continue to be a place of growing and stretching, but I hoped that through my quiet reassurance, the future graduates of AVS would also feel supported by the same foundations I felt.
Since becoming a Staff Member, I have come to know the intricacies and hardships associated with the job, and just how much it takes to be a reliable steward of the school. But I have also come to know just how rewarding it is to see the confidence and comfort in young people’s eyes when they have come to truly understand that they are supported, and they are free.
Cody
The Circle School - Harrisburg, PA
I attended The Circle School from 2004-2009, aged 13-18. Leaving The Circle School was hard, and I told my friend (and now mentor) Jim Rietmulder that I'd be back as a staff member some day. I went off into the world, attended college, worked, discovered passionate interests as a musician and a comedy improviser, and forgot all about returning to The Circle School. I tried to make a career in music and found it removed all romance from my beloved hobby.
In the fall of 2020, I found myself in the uncomfortable space of having given up my dream of a music career without knowing what might take its place. I took a lot of long walks, thinking about my future. The future seemed murky, but when I shifted my perspective to the present, things came into focus. "How do I want to spend my days right now?" I wondered. The answer came immediately: I want to work at The Circle School. I want days with novelty, connection, and purpose, in a community and environment I want to be in, with people who also want to be there.
The Circle School hired me and I started in May 2021. I've gotten what I came for and more, including occasional challenges, which have pushed me to grow in ways I couldn't have foreseen. It can be tempting to wish away life's challenges, and yet, 18 years ago, a nagging dissatisfaction with an unchallenging life was exactly what drove me from a traditional public school to The Circle School.
I'm realizing I have a constitutional aversion to doing unchallenging, meaningless work. I suspect most people do, to varying degrees. My work at The Circle School has been deeply meaningful, and it's provided amazing challenges: those significant but surmountable challenges that yield transformative, satisfying growth. My path of personal growth is perfectly aligned with my work at The Circle School. I think that should be true for all staff at schools like ours. In my teen years, I enjoyed the abundance of growth opportunities born of a self-chosen life. Returning as staff, it's such a privilege to work in an environment that continues to yield those opportunities while being entrusted to hold open the space for others to experience the magical growth and satisfaction born of a self-chosen life.
Marc
Alpine Valley School - Denver, CO
When I was a student at Alpine Valley School in 1997, my primary career aspiration was to return as a staff member when I grew up. I thought about it a lot, though with very little detail. I only knew that I wanted to stay at the place that had so profoundly changed my life and help the school continue to do the same for others.
When I graduated, I took a job in a call center my first summer out of school, which evolved into a career in project management spanning a decade. I traveled worldwide, worked on exciting projects, and partnered with amazing people. But, at the end of the day, there was sometimes an empty feeling of having accomplished nothing more than making a mega-corporation another million bucks. In the end, I quit my job and began to seek out another career that was more meaningful to me.
And here is where my childhood dream came true: I got a call from AVS asking if I would consider being a staff member. I'm sure the word "yes" was out of my mouth before Larry even finished asking the question. Then, a few months later, my son was born, and my commitment to the school was redoubled.
I came into AVS as a staff member not knowing what to expect and was immediately faced with significant challenges. The school was in the middle of a difficult time and the situations tested me right away, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually. There were moments where I nearly walked out that first year. But then I remembered what an oasis Alpine Valley School had been for me as a young person and thought about my son spending his entire young life in that place, which gave me the strength to keep going. I also remembered that I had asked for a job that was more meaningful and here it was, with all the responsibilities that came with it.
Things began to get easier. I started working to effect some positive changes, learning more about what it meant to interact with others as a staff member rather than a student, and carve out a role for myself.
This will be my ninth year as a staff member at AVS, and I couldn't be happier or feel more fortunate to be here. There have been other moments of struggle (2020, anyone?), but there have been exponentially more moments of joy, satisfaction, and success. Most mornings, when I drive around the building to pull into the parking lot, I still smile and think that there is nowhere else in the world that I love so much as this little school.
Ben
Macomber Center - Framingham, MA
I remember the first time I set foot on the campus of the Sudbury Valley School in 1985. I was eight years old and had never been to school. Up to that point I had been unschooled and I was not comfortable being away from my mother for any amount of time. But almost as soon as I stepped into the building, I felt at home and I had absolutely no fear about being left on my own there all day. I spent the next 12 years of my life there and during those 12 years I don’t think there was ever any other place in the entire world I wanted to be more than at my school. I finally forced myself to graduate shortly before turning 20 years old.
I lived the next 12 years of my life much the same way that I had lived my life at Sudbury Valley; following my curiosity and taking long deep dives into various areas of interest, some old, some new. I spent about eight years exploring music school, art school and several universities in and around the Boston area. After finishing a 5th year Independent Study Program at art school, my work was shown in the contemporary wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and won two 1st place cash prizes for my work in juried shows, including one which was a traveling scholarship. This would have been a great launching pad for a young artist, but I was not interested in moving to New York to pursue an ambitious career as an artist. Instead, over the next few years, I split my time between working part time as a house painter, working alone in my studio, and studying the relationship between Buddhism and Western philosophy at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre Massachusetts.
During all this time I never thought much about Sudbury Valley School or radical alternative education. That was something my mother was passionate about - to me, it was just that weird school I went to which most people have never heard of. Sometimes I enjoyed shocking people by telling them that I went to a school with no requirements. But for the most part, I just didn’t think much about it. In fact, if someone had asked me after I graduated from Sudbury Valley if I could imagine being a staff at a Sudbury school or something similar to it, I would have been horrified by the very idea. While I loved every minute of my time at Sudbury Valley and though the people I grew up with there are like family, my focus was now to make my way in the world and prove myself by conventional standards.
It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I started to seriously reflect on the rare privilege I had been afforded by my parents. I remember I was walking my dog in the park one day and it just sort of hit me out of the blue; this rich, engaged life I was living was all an extension of the life I had been allowed to live at Sudbury Valley. It occurred to me that although many people my age had achieved certain outward markers of a successful adult life, I had something many people my age lacked, namely a solid sense of who I was, what was important and meaningful to me, and the knowledge and skills to passionately pursue the things that I loved. This is because Sudbury Valley afforded me the time and freedom to figure out who I was, to follow my own curiosity, to exploit my own talents and strengths, and to build my own knowledge and skills around the interests that would sustain me for the rest of my life. Suddenly I felt a strong sense of gratitude for the school, as well as a desire to help ensure that the school would be around to benefit future generations as it had benefited me and so many other people I know. So I decided to visit the school and see if there was any way that I could get involved and give back.
I was invited by the school meeting to spend as much time there as I wanted over the next few months. During this time I started reading some of the books I had always heard mentioned as a child but never actually read, such as Free at Last and The Sudbury Valley Experience. I became curious about the history of radical education which had led to the founding of Sudbury Valley. This of course led me to A. S. Neil’s Summerhill, another book I had often heard mentioned but never read. Reading Summerhill was eye-opening for me. This is when I realized that the school where I grew up, which I had always thought of as obscure and idiosyncratic, was deeply rooted in the same 1960’s counterculture which had produced so much of the art and criticism that had become important to me in adulthood. When I saw that Erich Fromm, one of my intellectual heroes, had written the foreword to Summerhill, I thought I was imagining things. As I read Fromm’s words, praising the visionary courage of A. S. Neil, I developed a whole new appreciation for this tradition of alternative education with its radical social and political implications, and a sense of pride in the school where I had grown up. This gave me a new entry point into the Sudbury philosophy which made it feel relevant to me as an adult.
While I was developing a new appreciation for the Sudbury Valley on an intellectual level, the daily experience of being back at the school took some getting used to. It still felt like home and yet I was no longer the same person. I was not a child. I was an adult. I remember Danny Greenberg telling me that some people are not able to make this transition from being a student at a Sudbury school to being a staff member. Some are able to move into the adult role quite easily while others fall right back into their old role, wanting the kids to like them and not wanting to ruin anyone’s fun by having to enforce the rules. I knew exactly what he meant. I could feel that pull toward my comfy old spot within the community. The process of an alumnus becoming a staff is often further complicated by the fact that the staff who have been at the school for many years naturally have a tendency to see them as the child they once were rather than the adult standing in front of them.
Who knows what that transition would have been like for me there. In the end, I did not run for staff. About a year later I became part of a group looking to form a new self-directed learning community. The Macomber Center was established in September 2012. In the beginning, it consisted of 15 kids and two staff, myself and Denise Geddes who had been a staff member at Sudbury Valley for 24 years. By the start of the second year we were able to bring on three more staff and we began offering a part-time option to unschoolers as a way to increase the number of members. 11 years later the Macomber Center is a thriving community of about 60 members and seven staff.
It has taken me a long time to figure out what being a staff in an SDE community is all about. This statement requires some explanation since one might naturally assume that, having grown up at Sudbury Valley, with a mother who was a staff, it should come quite easily. Of course, I knew the party line on the Sudbury model of education as well as anyone. Not only did I spend all day every day at school but my mother would drag me to events at night, public talks by Danny or Mimsy as well as staff meetings, trustees meetings, and assembly meetings. And when I was not at school, I was often around adults talking about the Sudbury model. So I was completely steeped in the philosophy. But this is precisely why it took so long to come into my own as a staff member. Just to take everything I had always heard on faith and not investigate it on my own terms would have felt shallow. Just as the founding staff at Sudbury Valley had to question everything our society believes about education, I now felt the need to question everything I had been raised to believe about children needing complete freedom from adult involvement in their education. I didn’t question the idea that children needed to have the final say in what, when and how they learn, but I certainly questioned the idea of a completely hands-off approach as the single and supreme pedagogical tool.
In the early days of the Macomber Center we experimented a lot. We had people coming in and offering things from the outside. We would post ideas on the wall for outings and field trips as well as volunteer projects out in the community. The staff would put things up on the board that they could offer. I tried all kinds of ways of engaging kids in things that I was interested in and things I thought they might be interested in. Any time a kid or their parents mentioned any kind of passing interest I would try to find someone to come into the center to teach it. I wanted to try to break all the pedagogical rules of the Sudbury Valley philosophy. Though nothing was ever made compulsory, I tried every way I could think of to entice kids to take part in our offerings. I once created a class with another staff that we were really excited about called the history of unimportant things. We were sure the kids would really enjoy it if we could just get them to come to it. So we provided free donuts for anybody who cared to join. Of course nearly everybody came. A lot of the kids said they really liked it and would continue coming even without the donuts. But eventually I came back around to the same conclusion that Sudbury Valley had come to decades earlier, namely, that any experience I or any other staff could provide for a kid, no matter how much he or she enjoyed it, was ultimately a diversion, distracting them from getting down to the real work of taking control of their own lives and education. I had to come to it on my own. There was no way around that.
What I finally realized was that kids really need two things from us, as staff: First, they need us to be there: They need us to be fully present, to be engaged, and to be ready to respond to whatever needs to be done. Second, they need us to leave them alone: They need us to trust, respect, and approve of who they are and how they are. In short, they need us to be aware of them without trying to get involved in what they’re doing. This is an extremely important role that we play because it can be found almost nowhere else in our society. Kids need adults in their lives who do not have an agenda for them. But sadly, most kids only have their parents and their parents’ close social/familial circles on the one hand, and then the authority figures on the other; all the teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, social workers, doctors, dentists, all telling them what to do and what not to do. They have very few if any opportunities to form relationships with adults based on equality, mutual respect, and shared interests. I want to be one of those few adults in our society that kids can trust not to be on the lookout for ways to guide, advise and improve them.