From The Roanoke Times New River Valley Current
Story by Albert Raboteau; Photos by Matt Gentry

New growth for New School?

Blacksburg New School, one of the few secular alternatives to public education in the New River Valley, turned 35 last week, boasts its largest student body in school history and soon will expand into a new building.

The cooperative learning situation will have room to expand at its new Blacksburg site.

BLACKSBURG - The Blacksburg New School is not that new. It turned 35 last week. But if all goes according to plan it will move into a new building early next year.

Construction of the school's $1.3 million, 6500-square foot building is under way on North Main Street near U.S. 460.

The new building is about the same size as the Ramble Road facility the K-8 school has rented since 1999. But the new location can be expanded, and it will be more accessible to the disabled. It also has lots of outdoor space where children can play or study nature.

The New School has 70 pupils this year, its most ever. Its grounds are half an acre. The school's special-use permit for its 5-acre property on North Main Street allows for 120 students, an increase of more than 70 percent, though another wing would have to be added to fit that many children. As it is being built now, the new building could house nearly 100 students.

But in a school that emphasizes small class size, individual attention, and a strong sense of community between teachers, parents and students, care will be taken not to grow too quicky, said T.J. Stone, head teacher, who has been at the school since 1989.

"We're not looking to double ourselves every year," she said. "The sense of community comes first."

The New School opened in 1971 and remains one of few secular alternatives to public education in the New River Valley. The school's cooperative educational philosophy is designed to maintain children's self-esteem and let them learn at their own pace.

"The kids have room to figure out who they are, not who they are supposed to be," said Susanna Rinehart, president of the school's board of directors. Two of her children have graduated from the school; a third is in the sixth grade.

The New School's maximum class size is 14 for elementary school children and 16 for middle school children. The school added grades six through eight nine years ago, and a combined 14 students are in those three grades this year. The New School has 14 teachers, six of whom work full time. Annual tuition and fees total about $5000. There are discounts for enrolling multiple children or helping out with school tasks.

Molly Lucier of Newport teaches middle school math at the New School. Her six-year old son attends the school. Lucier said she appreciates "being able to work wit parents and know their kids very well, because it's such a small atmosphere."

It's common for New School students to go on to Blacksburg High School. Stone said her school has a good relationship with the county school district. Part of its middle school program is to prepare students to enter a tradional school environment.

Despite the potential for more students in the new building, the New School does not plan to add high school grades, Stone said.

In today's era of No Child Left Behind, the New School does not stress standardized testing like public schools do. Students don't take Virginia Standards of Learning tests, though they do take other tests, including the Qualitative Reading Inventory. Five years ago the New School earned accreditation from the Virgina Independent Schools Association, and its status is up for renewal this school year.

Original plans were for the school to open its new building in 2003. Fundraising was tougher than expected, and the size of the building was scaled back. Still, school official hope to be able to start on a addition not long after the building opens. January is the target date for the opening.

When the building is ready, students will get a three-day break to allow materials to be moved to the new school before classes resume in the new location.

Anne Larsen of Blacksburg has a daughter in second grade at the New School.

"I really like the small class size and the indiviual attention that the children get," Larsen said. "I like the philosophy of cooperative learning: making it be a lifelong joy rather than a chore."

  Cooperative learning principles:

• Use positive reinforcement to encourage children to progress at their own rate
• Emphasize critical thinking and inquiry rather than rote learning
• Allow the mixing of age levels within the school so that children can help one another
• Encourage parental participation in school activities and the daily running of the school

Email sent from John Gerth to the Blacksburg New School in celebration of our 30th anniversary

From: John Gerth [mailto:gerth@stanford.edu]
Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2001 6:02 PM
To: T.J. Stone
Cc: Ann Goette
Subject: Re: Blacksburg New School - the early years

Well, I have managed to steal a little bit of time tonight and started out by surfing the Web to see what of BNS was out there. I quickly found your website and paged through it. Frankly, I'm amazed at how much of what's there would be just what I imagined from the early years. A feat which must be considered remarkable given the that the school was founded and maintained by parents of its students not the teachers. I wonder how many other alternative schools can say that.

But analyzing the school's evolution is not what you asked me about so on to a little bit of history. What follows is a very personal view which should not be taken for, or confused with, the truth. And if you're really looking for something for a fundraiser, I still recommend getting Ann to tell the story.

Right now I'm looking at a grainy 5x7 photograph of the '71-'72 year. In it, I can count 31 children including one bemused third grader (we were K-3 that first year) perched somewhat like a pelican about two feet above everyone else on the large pole which supported the back porch of the annex we'd rented from the Episcopal Church (near corner of Church + Progress St ?). Getting that building was somewhat of a miracle itself since the Episcopalians were not themselves the sort of congregation likely to support our enterprise, but it was just the right size for us and right downtown so we were very accessible. All but two of the faces in the picture are white and at least half are of five year-olds since kindergarten is a time when parents are more willing to experiment. The majority of them are children of junior faculty at the university, many who'd moved to Virginia from states with more generous public education programs.

Also in this, our only formal "school picture", are the two full-time faculty that first year, Betty Jean Young, then one side or the other of 40, who's youngest child, Steven, was a second-grader and me. Betty Jean and I were paid something like $3000 a year and I think she also got the $300/year tuition waived for Steven. Betty Jean, who's currently an ordained Presbyterian minister, with a parish in Oregon, is one of the warmest, kindest, yet most practical people I ever knew. She worked tirelessly on the curriculum and organized the gathering of the materials. She seemed to know everyone in town and was on good terms with them all. This was fortunate since I was a 23 year-old refugee from Boston with long hair, glasses, and a civil engineering degree from MIT. One of the "lost lambs" of the 60's, I had been teaching high-school math in New Jersey when I got a letter from Jane Lee who said that her sister Ann was going to start a "free school" down in Virginia. I had worked with Jane in Boston on the "Cambridge Free School" an alternative school in the working class neighborhoods between MIT and Harvard which had been snuffed out when the landlord sold the building to avoid having to pay protection to the local mob. Now, I really had been more of a community organizer than a teacher there - spending my nights at "model cities" meetings watching Tip O'Neill's staff whirl like dervishes hoping to satisfy all the different factions - so it was pretty much pure chutzpah for me to go to the interview in Blacksburg that spring with the words of Neil Postman, Jonathan Kozol, and the like ringing in my head but with very little teaching experience.

They hired me anyway and as soon as the school year in New Jersey ended, I got on a plane to Roanoke (I didn't own a car) with a carefully packed green army duffel bag. One of the parent families, the Klemmack's gave me a rent-free room upstairs in their house and someone got me a summer job at the Tech Computing Center, but we really spent every free minute trying to fix up the school on Progress street for the opening in September. Working day and night is pretty easy when you've got a bunch of young people so we sawed, hammered, painted, and scrounged through the long summer evenings. I was so excited (I'm now embarrassed to say) that I didn't go back north for my parent's 25th anniversary party because school was going to open two days later. As I remember the building was built in a sort of "shotgun" style - long with a central corridor. I think there were three rooms on each side of that hall with a small kitchen in the back and small office at the front. The raised back porch led down to a side yard and a large, paved back parking lot which was our playground. Kindergarten was a half-day affair and the remaining 1-3 grades then spread out through the building after lunch until 3:00 pm.

The Fall was chaos for a while. We actually had too many volunteers. Whole waves of students would come over from campus. By Thanksgiving it was clear that we had to get pretty hard-nosed about the commitment you had to make to be allowed in. After Christmas we managed to cut things back drastically until we had a core of regulars who were indispensable. Most notable among them were Nancy Nehrt and her companion Ted Ismay, who claimed to be a descendant of the captain of the Titanic. Ted was an itinerant carpenter who had a great rapport with the kids and helped them with many building projects.

But it was the parents who were the heart'n'soul of the place. Aside from Ann and the Klemmack's, I don't remember who was on the board, but I do remember a number of people, Rosa Kirkman, Bruce and Georgie Klein, the Grovers, Bernds, Franks, and Morrises by name. Time has robbed me of many other names but I can recall the warmth an generosity of many more parents and adults who wanted to help us out. And we spent a lot of time at night meeting and talking about what the school needed and where it was headed. And it needed almost everything. I remember spending New Year's Eve 1972 coating the new worktables with shellac and having the windows wide open to get rid of the fumes. By midnight I think there were only a couple of us left and we actually rang in the New Year a couple of times by changing the radio station from the local time to pick up one of the big Chicago stations in the Central.

We had parents in the school almost all the time and they handled virtually all of the arts as well as taking the kids into their daily lives on field trips. Most of our projects were pretty small, but we did get talked into participating in a independent film that Fall "Snowville". Several times a week for a month, I would borrow the Klemmack's VW bus and take a half-dozen of the older kids to the set (a farmhouse in Snowville) where we would both prepare for our own scenes and watch the incredibly detailed, (and painfully slow) process of creating a movie. I remember even the ride vividly because it was the year that Don McClean's "American Pie" was a top-40 hit so we all learned and sang along as we rolled across the hills and up the valleys. I also remember field trips to see the experimental deer station on campus (another parent's research project) and the "giant" computers in Burruss Hall where I worked on the weekends.

Then as now, we wanted the children to progress at their own rate and tried to minimize the lock-step age grouping which is probably forced on the public schools by, well, the public. I used a lot of manipulatives in Math - we had a fairly large set of Cuisenaire rods and lots of nuts, bolts, screws, and seashells which could be counted and arranged in all sorts of ways. Of course reading was central and we spent lots of time with the younger ones just reading to them and encouraging them to tell stories. Inevitably there were a few parents who, by year's end, wanted to measure their kid by the public school standard and there ensued some pretty lively debates about that. We did have two students with fairly serious problems. One was a foster child who'd been horribly abused by his natural parents and was still recovering from that. The other had what would now be called ADD, but went by the name of hyper-activity then. I had started out not believing that this was a real thing, but we did eventually find that by painting the small office room in the front of the house a single shade of flat grey and giving him a personal tutor for a large part of the day that he would respond. By the end of the year his parents noticed a marked improvement.

Heading into the second year it was clear that we were still far from a sure thing to survive. It seemed to me that money was a big problem (Jimmy Stewart in the drying out scene in "It's a Wonderful Life" responds to Clarence's pooh-poohing of money with "Well, it comes in pretty handy down here, Bub") and that I might be more valuable as a philanthropist than a teacher - especially since I could replace myself easily with my old college roommate, Bruce Wheeler. That done, I turned my part-time job in the Computing Center into a full-time one and donated a chunk of my salary to the school. I also took over as treasurer, doing the payroll and taxes. With the help of Tony Distler and a lot of paperwork with the government, we achieved tax-exempt status although we had to prove that we were not one of the southern "segregation academies". During all this I remember trying to talk to our IRS caseworker in Richmond but she was never there. Like Major Major in "Catch-22" the only time you could see her was when she wasn't in. Finally, I got her on the phone one day before one of her four hour lunch/shopping breaks and asked the question I wanted about our taxes. She shrugged and said, "Don't your lawyers do that - we pretty much accept what a client's lawyers say" -- my first lesson in how vigilant our corporate tax watchdogs are. Inevitably, I spent less time at the school although I'm pretty sure that was the first year we took a handful of students on the overnight trip to Jonesboro, Tennessee to the "National Storytelling Festival". It was a wonderful time, ghost stories in the graveyard at midnight and all so we returned most Octobers after that.

We were still in the Episcopal annex that year, but they had always been planning to tear it down so we had to move on to a new building. I gradually faded out of active participation, took a sabbactical to ride a bike around Europe in 1974, and came back to Blacksburg where I was in the College of Architecture until I left for California in 1978. By then BNS was pretty much an established institution in town. Ann's sister Jane had come to be one of the teachers and then gone on to head the Gifted Programs in Montgomery County. We had many talented and dedicated teachers, but the school always took its direction from the parents which probably makes it probable that most teachers will move on after a few years.

I'm sure there are many people I've missed and many events that I should've mentioned but didn't. Given how much I've let slip I would encourage you to write your history as you go making sure to write the stories down each year and add them to your web site. A sense of your own history can be a valuable asset in recruiting and and an important resource in seeing how the inevitiable tough times were handled in the past. Having survived more than a quarter of a century, you should feel proud and do what you can to hand this valuable institution on to the children who will come to it in the future.

Regards,
John