Planting Life Practices

Editor’s Note: Richard Lodish, associate head and lower school principal at Sidwell Friends School (Washington, DC), took a sabbatical in 2001–02 to serve as the founding head of the elementary level of the East Bay Conservation Corps Charter School in Oakland, CA. He wrote about his experience in Adventures of Charter School Creators: Leading from the Ground Up, a book of collected essays, edited by Terrence E. Deal and Guilbert C. Hentschke, and published by Scarecrow Education in 2004. Joanna Lennon is the founder and CEO of the East Bay Conservation Corps (EBCC) in Oakland, CA. Cathleen Micheaels is a consultant with EBCC who helped facilitate the planning for the school and managed EBCC’s school-based service-learning program. The excerpt is here reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

My journey to the East Bay Conservation Corps Charter School encompassed three years and 140,000 miles. It began when I received a call from EBCC’s founder and chief executive officer, Joanna Lennon, asking me — convincing me, really — to serve on a national advisory team that was being convened to design a new charter school in Oakland, California. For the previous 25 years, my career had been rooted at Sidwell Friends School, a 125-year-old Quaker institution, first as the lower school principal and then as the associate head. As a Quaker school built upon the foundation of service, Sidwell Friends School has a mission and values similar to those of the East Bay Conservation Corps, so my participation in helping to plan for the opening of a school committed to service learning, spiritual development, and creative expression was not only professionally purposeful but personally compelling.

While I believe deeply in the mission of Sidwell and hold a deep affection for the students and families who are part of the school’s community, I missed the challenges and complexities of urban education, which launched my career in education. Prior to my many years at Sidwell, I taught elementary school and so-called “behavior problem students” in the Cleveland public schools. My four years in graduate school had concentrated on urban education, and most of my volunteer and board work has centered on helping children in Washington’s inner-city schools.

From nearly 2,000 miles away in Washington, D.C., I agreed (with gracious support from Sidwell) to fly out to California once a month to participate in the EBCC Charter School Curriculum Development Team, which received national funding to plan the elementary level of the EBCC Charter School as a model for schools across the country. This team, convened to think through the framework for the school, included a remarkable and eclectic collection of minds — professionals and leaders in the fields of service learning and education reform, public and private education, citizenship and civic participation, research and evaluation, and ethics and theology.

A Remarkable Vision
The elementary level of the EBCC Charter School was created as part of a natural evolution of the education programs and services already offered by the East Bay Conversation Corps. Since 1983, the EBCC has provided leadership in serving low-income urban youth and in developing active learning strategies that imbue young people with a sense of their role in the community. The EBCC Charter School emerged out of the organization’s 20-year history of pioneering programs which promote the civic engagement of children and youth within the context of improving public education and strengthening the larger community. The EBCC Charter School includes two divisions: the corpsmember program division, which opened in September 1996 and is focused on meeting the immediate educational and employment needs of students between the ages of 17 and 24 years, and the elementary level division, which opened in September 2001 to serve K–4 students, expanding to include grade five in September 2002 and grade six in September 2003 (middle and high school grades will be added in subsequent years).

For nearly two decades, the EBCC has been dedicated to promoting youth development, through environmental stewardship, community service, and furthering education and social change. The foundational beliefs that shaped the EBCC as a youth- and community-development organization were also the foundations for the guiding principles that shaped the elementary school level of the EBCC Charter School. As the mission of the school states:

The EBCC Charter School was created out of the belief that public schools must prepare children for the challenges, opportunities, and responsibilities of life in a democratic, pluralistic society. Through service learning, the curriculum and culture of the school integrates service, spiritual development, and creative expression from across a full range of academic subjects.

Two years before the school opened, the EBCC Charter School Curriculum Development Team completed a comprehensive document, The East Bay Conservation Corps (EBCC Charter School) Framework, which articulated the educational philosophy of the EBCC Charter School and demonstrated how service learning provided us with the methodology to carry out our guiding principles. This part of the journey — planning and envisioning an ideal charter school based on core beliefs of the EBCC — while complex and time-consuming, proceeded rather smoothly. Our team had the luxury of time to think and reflect, and, most important, we had the support of a group that is well-organized and well-respected for its commitment to youth and service learning, with a long and proud history in California and across the country.

The closer we came to opening a real school with real kids, the more I felt compelled to be an integral part of this creation. Joanna Lennon, the founder, dreamer, and doer behind the school, sense my need. After many discussions with Joanna, as well as the head of Sidwell Friends, its board, and my family, I decided to commit the next year to serving as the founding head of the elementary level of the EBCC Charter School. Fortunately, I received a generous sabbatical from Sidwell Friends to do so.

Uncharted Territory: Openness to Challenges, Opportunities to Grow
Just as our team created the time and opportunity to plan and reflect, our newly hired faculty participated in a three-week Summer Teacher Training Institute where we planned curriculum, discussed ways to integrate service projects, and heard from experts on topics ranging from spiritual development of children to math and reading programs. Yet, even with this time to reflect and plan for our new school, the reality of 120 children from all across the East Bay area, from all kinds of family situations, promised to be filled with the unexpected. You can only plan so much for the unknown — the energy, the angst, the tears, the laughs, the anger, the joy, the perceptions, the misperceptions, and, yes, the love that goes into starting a new school. Often during our three years of planning, I would say to the team that our real challenge would occur the first September that the school opened when the inevitable, multiple collisions and unexpected detours began.

This part of the journey as the school’s first principal was, for me, like a scene from the popular movie Back to the Future. From my early career teaching in the late 1960s in inner-city Cleveland to leading a charter school in urban Oakland in 2001, I found that, sadly, very little had changed. The poverty and the predominantly single-parent families with access to few personal or institutional resources were still dominant. Parents harbored tremendous love for their children, coupled with the hope that life for the next generation would not be filled with the same hardships they had endured. So many parents would do anything for their children even though often overwhelmed by the exigencies that life presented them. All this was hauntingly familiar to me; in fact, it was almost identical to my experiences 35 years earlier while teaching in Cleveland.

Personally, I have found that life in the Oakland/Berkeley area has also been like a return to the 1960s — it’s a ponytail world with psychedelic painted VW buses parked on nearly every street and coffeehouses on every corner. This change of venue has proved healthy, if a bit disconcerting. (In my first stab at the faculty handbook, I included snow days, unaware of the need for earthquake drills.) This new journey has posed many professional questions as well: what traits, talents, knowledge, and so-called expertise from my 35 years as an administrator and teacher would be transferable to a new setting with fresh and different challenges?

A Family Affair
As I write this, we are in our fourth month of school. Also, as I write this, two students have rushed into my office proudly boasting that they have honored their signed commitments to “not hit and try to help each other until 3:30.” I pat both of them on the back and they give me a big hug and we all shake hands over the background music of the next-door kindergarten class singing an insect song: “head, thorax, abdomen, and wings” to the tune of “head, shoulders, knees, and toes.” With 12-hour days as the norm, I have very little time to reflect on what is going on, let alone to write about it. I have rarely felt so exhausted or so valued. My spirits are high, my body fatigued. I wonder where people in true service professions find time to reflect or write. Our journey is in overdrive and it is hard to downshift.

Luckily for our school (and for me), we have recruited an exceptional teaching staff (from the over 200 résumés we received to fill our nine positions) to join us on our charter school journey. We hired six K–4 teachers, a full-time music teacher, a full-time support teacher, and a part-time art teacher. They are teachers who not only share our vision for the school, but also are equally passionate about teaching and learning.

Our second-grade teacher, in her first weekly newsletter to her students’ parents, wrote, “It is very exciting to be challenged in such a purposeful way. I am grateful to have such a profoundly meaningful job. Together, all who are involved in the vision of our school are embarking on a voyage to push the limitations put on public education and open doors for our children and our communities. I am happy t to be a part of this transformation.”

I was also fortunate that our newly opened K–4 school was one division of a much larger service organization — the East Bay Conservation Corps. Many responsibilities were lifted from my shoulders and handled effectively and efficiently by the EBCC. The development, accounting, and human resources departments all contributed expertise in planning and opening the school by taking care of everything from revenue projections to fund-raising to employee benefits. Because of the help from our “parent organization,” I have been free to spend most of my time where I belong — helping students, teachers, and parents.

To complete our journey, we needed students, of course. We recruited students who represented the ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic diversity of the San Francisco Bay area, with the majority of the students drawn from Oakland and neighboring East Bay-area communities. We met with prospective parents in libraries, recreation centers, church basements, kitchens, and dining rooms around the city. All of our prospective parents participated in a two-hour mandatory meeting describing our school’s mission and purpose. In my talks with parents, however, it became clear to me that many parents ultimately chose our school to avoid a former school in which their child had a negative experience, rather than from a clear desire to participate in our school’s vision.

The site we ultimately found was the site of a former charter school that disbanded in the middle of their third year (sadly, an experience paralleled by a number of other charters across the country). The school building — which was constructed in the early 1900s and served as a Catholic parish school, most recently to a predominantly African-American Catholic community — was an unbelievable mess. It appeared that everything but the students and teachers had been left behind; the building was filled with desks, chairs, tables, student papers, sweaters, lunches, and even a working copying machine. Because of the EBCC’s history in the community and the parish's (St Columba’s) desire to maintain a neighborhood school, we were welcomed with open arms. Father Jayson, the much-loved priest who was instrumental in helping us to secure the site, continues to visit us often and more than once has remarked that we have accomplished a miracle in bringing the school back to life.

To prepare the school for its opening, we relied heavily upon EBCC corpsmembers (17- to 24-year-olds completing their high school education through the corpsmember program division of the EBCC Charter School). They helped us to get the school building and grounds into shape. The staff and corpsmembers picked up trash and debris and planted trees to beautify the school grounds. We were involved in extensive renovation of the school site, including lead and asbestos abatement, mold removal, tiling, carpeting, and painting. Construction crews put up walls to create additional classrooms on the upper level of the school building, demolished old rooms in the lower level to create a larger downstairs space, and installed handicapped-accessible bathrooms in the upper and lower levels of the school. Nearly all of the renovation work was donated or contributed at cost by vendors and partners of Webcor, the construction firm that also designated the EBCC as the “Christmas in April” project (now “Rebuilding Together”) in 2002. Parents and faculty came on Saturdays to paint, plant, build, chat, and eat. A sense of shared ownership and involvement began, and what seemed initially impossible — actually renovating the site by September when the students would start the first day of school — occurred with the tremendous assistance of staff and volunteers and the unrelenting drive of our leader, Joanne Lennon.

Finding Our Parts and Working Together
On September 5, 2001, the first day of school, the real journey was launched with 115 students enrolled in two kindergarten classes, one first-grade class, one second-grade class, one second-/third-grade class, and one fourth-grade class. Our task during the first month was to develop a school culture — a balance of structure, discipline, and caring — that would help carry us forward. We established the procedures and ground rules to guide us in the hallways, the playground, and the classrooms — routines and rituals that have brought our school community closer together.

Every Monday morning, all our students and teachers sit in silence in a large circle in our music room. Out of the quiet, children and adults are invited to share their reflections and thoughts with the entire school. On Fridays, all students participate in an assembly where our school song is sung. There is also time set aside in which students and teachers can honor or praise one another. During our first “honoring,” a second-grader stood up in front of everyone and proudly said, “I want to thank all the people who volunteered their time to clean and build our great school.”

Yet, every new endeavor has growing pains. As I anticipated from the beginning, discipline and class management presented a large challenge and needed to be tightened. Our second-grade teacher included this note to her parents in her second weekly newsletter: “One of the areas where I have been most challenged thus far is in classroom behavior. I realized a little too late that this class needs a little more structure than I had originally thought. Now I am backtracking just a little bit and pulling the reins more tightly. Structured procedures and high expectations are necessary in maintaining a classroom environment that fosters both interactive and independent learning. I ask that parents support me in this by discussing with your children the importance of listening, following directions, and working toward collective goals in the classroom.”

At our first Back-to-School Night (which 80 percent of our parents attended), I stressed the need to balance firmness, structure, and clear disciplinary policies with lots of gentleness, love, and academic challenge. I told our parents that this balance would help us create a cooperative school environment. However, I also emphasized that in order to have a school free of violence, we needed to take our discipline policies one step further. We had to maintain a school environment that was safe, secure, and provided an opportunity for all students to learn. We had to honor our mission and guiding principles.

On the second Monday of school, after our initial period of silence, I stood in front of our 115 students and sounded a lot like Sidney Poitier in To Sir with Love. I told the students in no uncertain terms: “You will respect each other, you will listen to your classmates and your teachers. You will not hit or fight in our school. We need to be a comfortable and safe place where everyone can learn the best they can.” I forcefully stated that “any hitting or physical violence would result in suspension for the rest of the day.” I explained that our school would not tolerate any student disrupting a class to the point where it took teacher attention away from other students.

During the first month of school, we established a “Reflection/Work Room.” If a child is acting in a way that significantly or repeatedly disrupts other students, is disrespectful, or hinders the learning process, the student is sent to the Reflection/Work Room, where he or she completes class work and a written commitment to return to class ready to participate in the learning process. We hope that this room would not only provide necessary time for students to reflect on their behavior and its impact on others but also allow our teachers to focus on their planned classroom activities without disruption.

One month after the opening of school, five AmeriCorps members — national service volunteers participating in the EBCC’s AmeriCorps program — were assigned to our school. They could not have come at a better time, as many of the teachers, even with class sizes of 20, needed assistance with their students. The AmeriCorps members (including an older sibling of one of our students and a parent hoping to attend college) have been supporting student learning through partnering in the classroom and small-group tutoring as well as assisting with our After-School Care Program, which nearly a third of our students attended.

We were also fortunate to have a thoughtful, hardworking parent, who grew up across the street from our school, volunteer to lead our Parent Association. I continue to be amazed and gratified by the support and generosity of our parents — especially in a new school in existence for only three months. Our parents established a parent listserve, organized family picnic and work days, initiated and contributed to a fund to provide assistance to families for the purchase of EBCC Charter School uniform shirts, donated classroom supplies, supported classroom teachers, organized free parenting classes, improved the school grounds, and hosted fun events (a harvest carnival/Halloween Parade and winter holiday bazaar) that have forged our community and enriched our children’s experience.

During the first month of school, I felt like an EMT, rushing from one crisis to the next — taking care of everything from instructing kindergartners about bathroom protocol to mediating violent outbursts during recess to helping children move past name calling and teasing — only occasionally stopping to catch my breath.

Being Respectful of the Difference We Share
After the first three months of school (it seemed like three years), we had begun to establish a school culture based on our mission. Discipline infractions were decreasing, cooperation and respect were increasing, treasured school rituals had been established, and service learning is being implemented. As a third-grade parent wrote to me just before our winter break: “I am extremely impressed with the way the school has evolved in such a short duration of time. My daughter is absolutely thriving…. When I pick her up after school she is bubbling over with information about her day. At night, she is excited and diligent about her homework. Her reading has improved immensely in just these four months and she is writing stories and poems that aren’t even assigned! At home, she paints pictures and sings songs that are peaceful and kind…. [All this] has infused a simple sense of spirituality in her that she carries throughout her daily life.”

Our students are involved in a number of community projects, including learning about nutrition and hunger through serving lunches at a neighborhood soup kitchen, learning about the overall importance of providing service in our community through working with senior citizens at our neighborhood recreation center and tending a neighborhood garden, and learning about conservation and recycling through participation in Project YES (Youth Engaged in Service), the EBCC’s school-based service-learning program. There is a different kind of energy igniting our students. Just this week, our kindergarteners are working with a fourth-grade reading buddy to research 10 new vocabulary words for use in a story they will share with the class and their parents. Down the hall, third-graders are reading poems that celebrate older people and writing poems of tribute to residents at the local Center for Elders Independence, where they read aloud every week. All of our classes have taken on a service project to improve the school. Projects include recycling, playground and grounds beautification, and lunchroom, hallway, and bathroom cleanup.

In her November letter to parents, one of our teachers wrote: “By now, students have a good sense of classroom expectations and their importance in creating a positive environment. I am pleased to say that I am already seeing steady progress in all your children. In both quality of work and attitude, your children have much of which they should be proud…. On Monday, we will concretely delve into our service-learning purpose. We will begin to look at the community surrounding our school and assess ways in which we can improve it. Our goal is to give service to our neighborhood and then learn from our service through reflection. I know our class is ready for the challenge!”

Yet, for every three steps our school moves forward, some issue or incident brings us one step backward. We have developed clear “Life Practices” about how to participate in the life of our school, which are boldly posted in our school’s entryway and in all our classrooms:

Be honest to yourself and others.

Be a thoughtful listener.

Speak from your heart.

Be respectful of the differences we share.

Be open to challenges and opportunities to grow.

Be alive with purpose and practice thanks.

Find your part and work together.