Linda has been the director for many years at Community School and became the director of Community High School at its inception 6 years ago.

Community School started out at Greenfield’s, in west of Salem. But it was started in conjunction with a bunch of Hollins professors. I think Paul Woods was the psychology professor [and] was the first chair of the board. Frank Obrien was an English professor and I took several courses from him. He knew I wanted to be a teacher and so I asked if I could go volunteer and do work out there and he, of course, said sure.

Bert Levine helped start Community School with these Hollins professors because his children were not happy at North Cross. And so that’s some of the reasons it got off the ground.

And the reason Community school is very lucky was in fact because Suzanna (Turner) had a lot of connections in the Valley from people who had sent their children to St. Catherine’s and who, from family friends, had some money and because she was such a charismatic person, she could persuade them to let loose of some of it.

Yes, absolutely but it was willing to go out and get the resources it needed from people that weren’t alternative. And generally the way it works is you were, I was always able to sell it to people on the premise that they would have liked this kind of education had it been available to them at the time. And lots of them had stories about being miserable in school and so one of the things Community school has always done, and or I’ve done, is to help students who don’t fit in the system: the kid that doesn’t read until he’s nine, he was supposed to read a little bit at 6. Those kids get really messed up by the system and Community School has always, because of people, like you say, like Piaget’s, because of the model that stresses in developmental appropriateness and developmental behaviors then that usually has to do with development, it doesn’t have to do with gray matter. So, if the kids are clever, and you can tell they’re clever, but they don’t happen to fit the model, then you’ve got frustrated parents in a public system that can’t accommodate them. We got a lot of those students and when you would go to sponsors, people you wanted backing, you could say often they were too clever for the public schools and they were bored to death. So they could intellectually buy into it. And usually the people I was asking money from they would have children in school at that point.

There was a group of parents that were very anxious to have their children continue in the same vein as opposed to going to public high school and yet the school didn’t have the financial resources to start the High School. So the school was willing to having it under its umbrella as long as those of us that were going to be starting the High School were willing to come up with the independent financials, which we did. I had done some prototype work when I was running the middle school in the eighth grade program with sending kids to Hollins to courses, etc and I felt strongly that kids at Community School couldn’t feel entitled to admission into the high school program because it was going to be advanced and alternative. Not every Community School student would be best served to go to that kind of high school. So we had to have separate admissions. And as it turned out, we usually had less than 50% of the student body at the High School come from Community School. So after a couple of years it became much cleaner and more reasonable to have a whole separate structure. So it’s a separate 501C, non-profit.  But we work together, we have a mutual understanding. We serve on each other’s boards. We’re philosophically the same.

…we do what they call looping: you have 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th grade kids in all four of them so you have a couple of teachers so, and then 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th, overlaps so you can have a couple of teachers with each one of them so you can put a new teacher with an established teacher. That’s good work when you can get it.

…the concept of a community is just that: it’s a question of how big a community can be and be effective. Certainly we have Roanoke Valley as a community, but it’s not a sort of close knit community where people know each other. On some level there’s an arbitrary limit, and for the High School we’ve chosen 60. Everybody can know each other, and the students can all know each other, the families can all know each other, should they chose to. You can get them all together in the same place without it being too burdensome. And then, the other addition in the High School is how many students we were willing to say grace over in downtown Roanoke. Sixty was it. So Community School right now is about 150, 155, which is really large for it in historic terms. It’s been large before and it’s shrunk back, now it’s large again. There is a difference even in 150 kids and 500, so I think that for the kind of effective interpersonal relationships that really are useful for older kids being able to work with younger kids, for faculty being able to know the parents, you do have to limit the size, or just better to have another one altogether than to keep getting bigger and bigger.

It could, I guess, but it’s taken 30 some years and the school still isn’t known in the Valley. There’s always competition, but my basic position is to be as supportive as possible, because the more schools that are doing good works, the better.

Since we started in the 70’s, lots of the things that we have championed have found their way into the public schools. There are lots more themed based activities in schools, there are lots more integrated learning, the Plato program, some of the fancy gifted programs, all borrow the techniques. The ones they can do a less good job about being developmentally appropriate. And a lot of that is size based.

…if a kid learns to read at 8, he’s not penalized for that as long as he seems to be doing well. Maybe he’s doing fine in math, maybe socially vary astute, but he just isn’t reading, then he’s not failed, he’s not sent back to the first grade until hell freezes. And so as a result when he can read, it is clearly a developmental difference, and he doesn’t ever take the kind of self-image beating.

The thing that will be important, in my mind, is not to lose the capacity to serve the needs of the kid during the middle of the year that needs us and not to, by default, lean more to the talented student because one of the things that’s made this high school interesting, one of the things that makes it something that I care about, is that it serves not just the best student, but it serves kids who are needy, I mean on one level or another, not necessarily financially. But, who really are taking a beating in the public system or some other private school and their life will be so succinctly improved by the experience. I think a kid that comes just because he happens to love art or he’s really smart and he’s bored, his life will be enhanced, but it may or may not make the same difference as it has for some kids that we’ve taken. I would hate to lose that capacity. I may be dreaming, we may never get to have 60 kids enrolled with another 10 on the waiting list, but if you did then the decisions on who to take become more difficult and I would hope we didn’t lose this sort of two prong mission,

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