Waldorf News

A Charter School’s Perspective

By Donald Samson

Is it possible for a public Waldorf charter school to reflect the same depth, joy, magic and artistic as well as academic excellence as a private Waldorf School?  Can a public charter develop a classroom culture that is equal in its manifold layers to what we find in the private sector?

Can public charter teachers take on the mantle of the Waldorf teacher with its demanding, yet rich inner life and equally demanding active outer life?  Although many think that the jury is still out, those of us who work in these public charter schools would reply with a resounding Yes!

Let’s take the case of Juniper Ridge Community School.  Juniper Ridge is a K-8 charter school in its third year of operation.  We are located in Grand Junction, a small town on the sparsely populated Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains.

Since the school’s inception, we have been committed to following the Waldorf curriculum and establishing a relationship-based environment in the classrooms.  We want all of our teachers to train and achieve Waldorf teacher certification.  We are a charter school because the economic demographics of this region could not support a tuition based school.  This is Waldorf education in its original intentions: for working class families.

Six of our teachers are certified Waldorf teachers.  Three of them earned their certification through the Hybrid Program from RSC while actively carrying a class.  Four of our teachers have taught in private Waldorf Schools.  The rest of the full time teaching staff are in a certification training program with Gradalis.  We even have on staff a pedagogical director, who was a long-time class teacher in a private Waldorf School.

We also take our February break during the President’s Day Week.  Since Juniper Ridge is a young school, located on the edge of the Utah desert, we have looked to the Front Range situated with mature schools to provide us with a venue for a conference.  This February, however, none of the private schools were offering more than an in-house conference among their own faculty.  Mountain Phoenix, a thriving public Waldorf charter school in Wheat Ridge, a suburb of Denver, was the sole exception, hosting Elan Leibner from the Pedagogical Section.

At first, we planned to attend.  Then we began thinking that for the cost of travel, housing and conference fees, what if we hosted our own gathering?  We decided we would give it a try.  It was a fortuitous decision, because on Monday of that week, a rock slide closed I-70, the corridor through the Rocky Mountains between the Western Slope and the Front Range.  It remained closed all week.  We would have not been able to attend.

However, we did not know this would happen when we began considering our own conference.  The first step to determine if we could move forward was to find and secure a keynote speaker.  Who could we find to come to little Grand Junction who would be able to inspire our teachers and deepen our emerging understanding of child development and the importance of inner work?

As Patrick Ebel, our administrative director, and myself, pondered this question, we both came spontaneously upon the same name.  Since the worst this individual could do was tell us he wasn’t interested or already engaged, we decided to be bold and give him a call.  To our delight, good fortune and disbelief, he accepted.  We were suddenly set to bring Eugene Schwartz to Juniper Ridge.

We could not have wished for a more ideal speaker than Eugene Schwartz.  Many of our teachers were already familiar with him, at least virtually, from attending his online courses.  Patrick and I knew him from personal contact and were delighted to introduce our teachers to his vast knowledge and understanding of all things Waldorf, together with his warm, humorous and engaging manner of presenting challenging concepts.

There is an advantage to working with teachers still new to Waldorf education.  They can raise questions that smack of freshness, which we old-timers would never consider.  Although I was hesitant, we handed the planning of the conference over to our three newly certified class teachers.  Trusting them turned out to be the best decision we could have made.  They asked Eugene to speak on topics he himself said he had never combined before, and as a result he titled our conference: Phenomenology and Imagination.

The charm of a pioneer school is its can-do attitude.  Teachers overcame their shy inherent sense of not being good enough and stepped forward to offer artistic breakout sessions.  My initial vision was that participants would bag-lunch it.  Our staff was not satisfied with this.  Teachers turned to parents and suddenly we had fully catered snacks and lunches.  We went from wondering if we could pull this off to suddenly having a full-fledged event, complete with a public lecture on the middle evening.

The Waldorf charter movement is growing fast.  Since we envision ourselves as regional hub, we reached out to the newly founded charter in Salt Lake City, the Wasatch Charter School, and closer to home, the North Fork School of Integrated Studies in the farming community of Paonia.  Teachers from both schools gratefully joined us.

Eugene held us spellbound, gave us opportunities to laugh at ourselves, and thoroughly wanting more.  He is a master of his subject, as well as possessing a subtle, dry humor that kept us wondering, Was that a joke?  The comment I heard repeatedly spoken with a sense of respect and wonder was that he presented hours of material and never looked once at any notes.  How does he do that? they wondered.  Teachers came to realize they were in the presence of the consummate Waldorf teacher.

There are still those who question the legitimacy of the Waldorf charter movement.  Our own teachers have experienced being treated like second class citizens whose questions were not worth answering while attending summer courses.  It is understandable if a trainer doesn’t quite know where to begin when a participant asks what etheric means, or wants to know who Armand is, when Ahriman had just been mentioned.

However, those of us who trained in a residential program and spent years in the classroom and on a COT helping to establish and stabilize our schools have much to share from our experiences.  We owe a debt to a movement that gave us a safe community in which to raise our children and perfect our craft as teachers.  We owe it to the next generation of teachers to be patient with their questions and take their intentions seriously.

I do not object when reservations and the criticism are leveled against Waldorf charter schools.  We are aware how much we have to learn and improve.  And after all, similar reservations and criticisms can equally be leveled at established private Waldorf Schools.  The fact is that Waldorf charter schools grow with the same sincerity and firmness of purpose, and they fall prey to the same weaknesses, holes in their curriculum and misdirection as mature private schools once experienced in their formative years.

The central question is: How do we want the future of Waldorf Education to evolve?

We inherited an Anthroposophical Society that was split into factions from the day Rudolf Steiner died.  The European Waldorf movement has long struggled with the compromises of receiving state funds along with state requirements and restrictions.

The movement here in the US has finally reached this point.  Waldorf education has proven itself sufficiently that state and district education boards are willing to allow us charter status and grant us state funding.  The return for the funding is abiding by state and federal mandated testing, as well as aligning with Common Core.  Every teacher, whether Waldorf or traditional, knows the high price this demands and the compromises to the teaching it requires.  Yet it goes with the territory, and Steiner was the first to say that we must abide by state requirements—and then proceed to do what we do best.

We are one movement with one spirit.  We all carry the same love for children and a desire to educate them in a manner that supports them in an age-appropriate way.  The public school teachers who “cross over” to Waldorf are skilled, sincere, dedicated teachers who felt stifled by the traditional public school classroom.  I, and many of the teachers I trained with, were drawn to Waldorf for different reasons.  We were attracted by the noble ideals, by the challenge and the guidance in the inner work, by the clear training of all the soul qualities that we ourselves had to develop before we could bring them to our students.

The public Waldorf teachers seem to be differently motivated.  They are veteran teaching professionals who are seeking more fulfillment in their work.  They know instinctively that education must be relationship-based, and that most children do not thrive in an academic-only environment.  They began looking for a new methodology, and learned along the way that they must train their own soul qualities, and then, out of the desperation to survive, they discover the essential importance of the inner work.

They admit they’ve never worked so hard in their lives (and for so little money, since many took pay cuts to work at our school), and yet agree that it is worth it.  They have spouses who complain that they rarely have time for one another anymore, yet also admit they have never seen their wives happier and so fully engaged.

We are one movement.  With the recent changes in the training centers, we must ask ourselves how we can best support the emerging and evolving face of Waldorf Education as it approaches its centennial.  How do we provide quality training for its teachers?  Do we throw up our hands and resign ourselves to a catch-as-catch-can approach?  Few of us are ready to agree that it is enough for a teacher to take an online course as preparation to teach.  Yet with the pervasiveness of web education, that is what will happen with increasing frequency.

Schools with limited or no teacher-training budgets tell their teachers to get the best they can.  We have the choice to scorn that this is happening, or to have open discussions how to remedy and strengthen the inevitable situation.  We can leave it up to schools to make their own peace with the training of their teachers, or we can pool our experiences and offer guidelines.

We are one movement, dedicated to bringing out of our inner work a classroom environment which supports the children to develop their soul forces in preparation for an active life unfolding their own personal destinies.  For the sake of the children in our care, I urge us to join hands as one unified Waldorf initiative.

Donald Samson, dsamson@juniperridgeschool.org
Director of Curriculum and Instruction
Juniper Ridge Community School
juniperridgeschoolco.org