The Vice-Principal Finds Fertile Ground in Park Slope

Our public school Vice-Principal was as much taken with the learning freedom basic to Democratic Education as the rest of the group and yearned to bring an Albany Free School-like, non-coercive learning structure to youngsters in his Park Slope, Brooklyn, neighborhood. As the Democratic Education start-up group polished its new, small school proposal late 2004, Alan Berger began publishing a series of articles in the Park Slope Cooperative community newspaper emphasizing the appeal of individual child freedom to learn whatever the child wished to know and of adult non-coercion in the learning process undertaken with this Freedom to Lean approach to formal education. (The Park Slope Cooperative is a member supermarket featuring natural, organic and as much as possible locally sourced food situated in the heart of a family gentrified section of Brooklyn, NY.) With the very first article, I believe, he made the neighborhood aware of scheduled informational meetings he was holding at the Co-op. His compositional seeds found fertile ground in Park Slope as the meetings yielded strong parental support for the Freedom to Learn approach to formal education; more, he found he was blessed with parents agreeing to work hard to get this type of school up and running. He formed his steering committee and immediate work began on fund raising, finding a suitable location and gathering learning material for the Brooklyn Free School (BFS).

I went to help Alan and his BFS project when the Democratic Education school start-up group all but folded in early 2005.  I thought the best place for me to be in the start-up process was on the fund-raising sub-committee where I could collaborate to generate the thousands of dollars required. I was seeing in my own school planning the need for hundreds of thousands of dollars and while the BFS was to be a far smaller enterprise, it still needed to be well funded.  Indeed, if a school is to insist its students choose what to know-which is fundamental, especially, in Free Schooling-I was thinking, then, the school had better have access to the widest possible knowledge sets and the widest possible ways of acquiring the knowledge from which to choose, potentially a very expensive undertaking and thus the need for as many thousands as it could get.  Every member of the sub-committee, including me, knew how to do the small amount fund-raising the likes I did in Boy Scouts which gave the troop the few hundred dollars needed to do our program, even to accomplish our deep winter/snow camping training and trekking. But, we, the sub-committee folks, needed to know how to raise the really big bucks. So,  I agreed to take as many of the free fund-raising classes given by The Foundation Center in Manhattan, reporting back what I learned so the sub-committee could adjust its strategies and get the big bucks.  I agreed to the undertaking as well to educate myself to what my project would need to do to acquire the cash.

The most important single thing I learned from these classes was that organizational fund-raising is a team sport: fund-raising fails when it is undertaken by only one individual as there is just way too much work for an individual. Unfortunately, at the time, the folks on the sub-committee were not in the frame of mind to be a team, so the needed big fund-raising was not going to happen. As I considered myself “just a visitor”, not having any children in the venture, I felt uncomfortable pushing the team sport fund-raising issue. Seeing no profit in my being on the sub-committee I scaled back my involvement to work getting the rented spaces cleaned and ready for opening, September, 2005.

It became apparent as I left the project when the first students were getting use to this new way of being schooled that almost all of the funding for the enterprise was going to have to come from parents taking a flier with their tuition in hopes that everything would work out in the end. Although the school stumbled greatly through its first three years because of being drastically underfunded, I think one could safely say that largely the parents' faith in the project worked out as it continues to this day having been successful enough to have bought its own building in another fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood. Unfortunately, the BFS remains underfunded, parents, staff and administrators agonizing yearly over meeting expenses, but, the BFS lives on in the fertile ground of parental faith in the Freedom from the adult over child power relationship of conventional schooling and in Alan's Brooklyn Free School.