Square Pegs, Solutions, Part 5

Hi, I’m Leo Fahey and I’m looking to start a school serving our square pegs. I've named it Sands College. Its Mission is to cultivate the intellectual gifts of the bright Learning Disabled youth from Breezy Point to Belle Harbor by providing them education environments dedicated to re-setting emotional and academic readiness to take responsibility for their own learning and to the exercise of that responsibility. These environments are to provide all youngsters individual and collective empowerment, mutual assistance and respect for individual interests, abilities and rates of social, cognitive and emotional growth. As I have pointed out, a sizable number of our bright children struggle daily. They possess ways of knowing at great odds with whom their present schools say they ought to be; their instinct to take responsibility for their studies, to learn in their own way, in their own time, is constantly surpressed. The cost of going against their instincts and trying to academically succeed using ways of knowing alien to who they are produce plummeting self-esteem, depression and learned helplessness leading to academic failure. Sands College would return to these bright youngsters the trust in their unique ways of knowing and the impulse to take responsibility for their course of study creating the conditions for academic success within each youngster.

Sands College would empower responsibility and academic success in four integrated levels representing a sequential growth from elementary education through junior college study. The levels are: The Primary School, The Venture Challenge, The Lower School and The Upper School. The Primary School uses an Open Classroom setting to establish a prepared environment. Children take responsibility for their learning as they engage the prepared environment through their unique interests, abilities and learning styles and collaborate with teachers in setting readiness and academic goals. The Venture Challenge, an intake personal growth program for the secondary education of The Lower School, creates community led outdoor adventure teams where youngsters take responsibility for trek organization and for the many outdoor chores necessary such as cooking and clean-up as well as land navigation and first-aid. The Lower School requires a high degree of personal responsibility as youngsters engage an intergrated curriculum through self-selected inquiry projects exploring Science, History, Arts, Letters, Performance and Foreign Language Arts and as each help others achieve individual learning goals. The Upper School enlists collective responsibility to create, maintain and facilitate Great Question explorations into the received knowledge coming from written tradition, Western and Eastern. Taking responsibility remains incomplete unless youngsters are empowered to manage their learning spaces. Sands College would employ a community governance model where youngsters and staff together make policy decisions at each developmental level and at the school-wide level. This is quite an abitious project, but all our children deserve all our best.

Feedback: 1) I want to thank Chris Stokes, President, Point Breeze Association, Donna Trotter, President, Roxbury Association, and Terry Cassidy, President, Rockaway Point Association, for allowing me to talk with their members at recent meetings. 2) I’m in the process of getting a meeting place for the first of a series of information/organization meetings to put Sands College together. The meeting will be in the evening on either September 20 or 27. Look for the announcement within the next week.