Episode 45

Larry Welshon with his father, Don,

Episode 45: Founding Stories - The Open School

This is the second part of our special series called Founding Stories, in which we interview founders of other self-directed democratic schools around the world. This episode takes us to sunny California to the two (yes, two) campuses of The Open School. Hear how founder Cassi Clausen’s Master’s Degree in Education led her to the self-directed democratic schooling model. You’ll also learn about the pioneering days of The Open School OC - bet you can’t guess where they held their first day of school!

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This episode is also available in video format on YouTube. 

Interview Transcript

Cassi: (00:00)

So my name is Cassie Clausen. I hail from the Open School. Our first school is in orange County, California in Santa Ana. And we actually opened a second campus this year in Temecula Valley. I have, um, a traditional education background and I, I got my first job out of college really was to be a Spanish one and English teacher at a private college prep school in st Louis, Missouri. So I was like 22, 23, something like that. And I had this job I was so excited about, but what I discovered is being in education, I actually really loved working with kids and I worked with teenagers. I was a teacher at a high school, so mostly had freshmen and sophomores. I was working with 14, 15 and 16 year olds and I fell in love with them. I just loved their personality, their spunk, their what I, you know, I just love being at school every day and being with these kids.

Cassi: (01:04)

And that was really, you know, what then drew me into saying, well, I actually want to go into education. I just, I'm curious about it. So I got a master's of education at university of Missouri and st Louis, uh, while I was teaching. And one of them was philosophy of education. And this is pretty much the first time that I ever consider that there was a philosophy of education. I just, you know, thought, well, there's teaching and then there's tests, you know, that we know how you do lesson plans and we know how you grade homework, right? Like that's how it works. Right? You know, I, so I remember reading and doing writing papers about Dewey and Montessori and um, and all of these educational philosophers who were all about intrinsic motivation and learner centered and choice. And then I would go to school the next day, whereas teaching and none of that existed, you know, was not part of the system.

Cassi: (01:58)

And so I just got more and more frustrated with it at the same time. One of the, I was exposed to summer Hill school and I just became fascinated with the democratic free school model. So, you know, I had all of the normal questions like, well, I'm sure this works for some kids who are, you know, self-motivated. But what about, you know, Dave here who sleeps through class that would never work for him or you know, things like that. And I would just always go back and forth simultaneously. I was married, I am still married, but I was newly married to my husband who is incredibly intelligent, really smart, and has a lot of educational trauma. And I call it that now. I didn't know that's what it was at the time. And it made for a really Rocky start to our marriage where he was really unhappy.

Cassi: (02:47)

He didn't really know what he wanted, who he was. All of this, you know, I, I would always say education quote worked for me. I was, you know, top of my class and I did all of these great things. Um, but I learned really well how to play the system. I learned really well how to follow direction. And, and I, I was starting to realize how that wasn't serving me. And we really both came to this realization that what we wanted was completely different from what we were doing. So he decided he wanted to go into video games. I decided I want to stay in education but I need to do, I need to know more about this democratic free school thing. We visited summer Hill. It just catalyzed it for me. And so we moved back here and started our family and I looked around and said, there's no school like this.

Cassi: (03:37)

And I came up with this idea and I thought it was such an amazing idea. I had researched unschooling and unschooling is all about life learning and all about, you know, so it was like, what if, what if we had a school that was like unschooling and summer Hill? And I thought I came up with this brilliant idea to get rid of classes and just ha, you know, kids just learn from, from life. But then we run the community democratically. And then I found out that Sudbury Valley had been doing it for, you know, 40 years at that point. And, and I was not an innovator. I just started just soaking in all of their material. Um, I had young children at the time and so I was just unsure of how I would start it. But then I got to the point where I was like, this has to happen.

Cassi: (04:20)

I have to have a school, I will start one. And, um, I'm an, you know, like not really gonna think about all of the details and how it's going to happen and how much sacrifice is going to [inaudible] require from me or from my family and all of those things. And so I put up a website and started, you know, seeing, seeing who else was available and who else was interested. Pretty soon after that, um, people started contacting me. We started opening for enrollment and we're looking for a campus looking for campus and we could not secure one. Um, no one would rent to us because we were brand new. We didn't have any track record of money, you know, we had no money at the time. So what I, what we did was we opened that first year by putting all of our resources into a 15 passenger man who we still have.

Cassi: (05:08)

And I say who, because he is a person and his name is Frank. And we, and we drove Frank around the County. We met in a, in a park. But when we wanted to have a home base, we used my house. I'm glad that we got it through it. And you know, I'm glad that we're here where we are. But the first one to two years were really hard on my hard on my family. I do think that now we're at a place where we're, Oh, this is our fifth year open in our, you know, our first campus. I feel a lot more relaxed and, and again, like I can, I can start looking more globally. I can think more like big about the organization. When we, uh, when I started the whole process of, of the open school and thinking about how we want to really effect the way people think about children.

Cassi: (05:57)

And it's, it has always been part of the vision too, to really change the philosophy and the change the way people think about children, especially in our area. But then what we really realized is having multiple campuses, multiple small campuses in our region would do a lot more too advanced this model and make it, make it V make it something that's normalized that that would help with that vision of effecting, uh, the way people think about children and promulgate this model around. But what we've actually come up with is we're creating chapter schools. So it kind of like the way that Ronald McDonald houses are organized, where there's like a, an a national organization, but then each chapter is its own autonomous Ronald McDonald house. Uh, but it's, but it's plotting along and hopefully, you know, we'll see. This is kind of a pilot program to see how, how it goes to, to split off and kind of open a second campus.

Cassi: (06:59)

I'm really hoping that if it's something that is, that that becomes successful here, I would love to see other schools replicate that because I think we w I mean especially if you look at the community in the, you know, the depth and the history that that other schools have compared to us. Like I think there could be a real potential. It almost like, it makes me tear up every time I think about it of the people who've come alongside I, there's a, there's a thing that I like to say about Santa and about, uh, Christmas. He is magic. Santa is magic and Christmas is magic. And, and the reason I say that, and I really believe this, I know it sounds super like woo, but like, because it's the magic of people coming together to create something. And that's how I feel about these schools, I feel about founding a school is that they're get, it's magic. It's this magical point when all of these people come together to create something that didn't use to exist. It wasn't here and now it's here. And the only reason it's here is not because of me. If I was the only person doing this, it would not exist. I would be a homeschooling mom. That's it. So because all of these people, and it just keeps snowballing and more and more people keep joining [inaudible] and it does feel like this, this magic thing that's beyond me, um, and bigger than me.