As I wander into the administrative office and glance around, I notice a piece of paper tacked to the wall. It reads, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The author is Benjamin Franklin, and as I look around at the hand-made costumes hung up on a rack, ready for an upcoming play, and the pieces of student art on the walls, I wonder how many people have thought to apply the quote to children.
Helen Hughes did, more than thirty years ago, when she started the school` for her daughter Meghan, who teaches there now. “When Meghan went to school, it didn’t suit her at all,” she says to me in her house overlooking the current location of the school, “I could see her dying in front of my eyes.”
“I would get sick all the time,” says Meghan, speaking quickly, the ideas spilling out of her, “but I wasn’t really sick, I was just sick of school.” She’s wasn’t alone, then or now. According to a province wide Ministry of Education satisfaction survey taken in 2006/2007, students don’t like school. Specifically, only 43 per cent of grade tens answered that they did. But at WH, that percentage rises dramatically, to 100. The numbers for grades 4 and 7 are similar.
This staggering approval rate is explained in the philosophy of WH and the other free schools (as they’re called), but articulating that can sometimes be difficult. One of the most touching summations of the free school philosophy I’ve ever heard is when Helen says near the end of our interview, “I tried in my career to say yes, as often as possible.”
Hers was a long career, which started when she began running the school in her house on Windsor Street, where the name originates. From there the school went through a number of changes in curriculum and location, finally becoming completely non-coercive in the early 90s, the same year I started attending. As our interview meanders over the 30-some years she guided the collaborative democratic governance of WH, a great empathy and love emerges for the different children she’s known in her career. She gently explains the organic way the school moved farther and farther away from the traditional, bureaucratic model, where students are often motivated through fear. They are taught to respect petty authority and accept their place in a hierarchical system.
In the early days of Windsor House, the students spent most of their time freely, but with a short daily tutorial. Each of the fifteen children who made up the school at the time would see Helen for half an hour a day, where they would work together on the specific academic needs of the child. She would send them out again with a note pinned to their shirt outlining the small bit of work they needed to do. “The problem,” she says, “became that as I went out to find the kids to get them for their little lesson, they were always engaged in something that was really interesting, and they didn’t want to be called away… so I’d go and try to find somebody else. Well, it was very rare that I’d find somebody that wasn’t totally engaged… it was very hard to pull them away… to do my dreary little school tasks.” So eventually, she and the other teachers and parents came to a radical decision: They stopped making them do anything at all.
Students at Windsor House were allowed to govern themselves. They picked their own classes (if they decided to go to class at all), organized their own field trips, made their own rules, and handed out their own punishments - all, of course with the help of staff and the parents, who are required to do half a day of volunteering per week. Because the school was run on a parent participation model, the classes were often led by parents. This created a range of possible topics that were literally endless. “We had unicycle basketball, hovercraft building, and banned books classes,” says one extremely articulate student, Sky Robertson, as she works on one of the 55 costumes she’s co-designing for a school play. “It was everything kids needed,” says ex-student Sylvia McFadden, now a photographer, “Free play, free time… If you wanted to do academic work, you could pester the staff…”
The philosophical approach to non-coercive learning is three-pronged. One: People are naturally curious, and if you allow them to decide on their own course of study, they will follow that curiosity and engage in the subject matter more deeply than anything they are forced to learn. Two: Giving children the freedom to make mistakes will allow them to learn from those mistakes, and come to better know themselves, their limitations and their strengths. And three: Schools should mirror society. If schools are to fulfill their ostensible mandate to mould citizens then they should be a microcosm of the democratic society, wherein students learn to govern themselves, interact with the community, and make decisions.
There is one such case that stands out above the others in the history of the school. Too many students had been drinking and doing drugs, and because WH was so radical, they were very vulnerable to accusations that they allowed student to do drugs during school hours. Realizing the extent of the problem, the staff called a series of meetings that ran all day every day until a consensus was reached.
It took three weeks. Eventually everyone, after hearing from all of the people who attended the meetings, realized that drug use was damaging to the school, and agreed not to do any drugs within school hours and within a fairly large area around the school. They enforced these rules on each other, and were maybe 13 to 17-years-old. That was how much they cared about the school.
A situation like that contrasts sharply with the level of disengagement usually present in high school, something university educators would do well to think about. “The universities didn’t start the problem of disengagement,” Dr. James Côté points out, “It has landed on their door step.” A professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario, he’s recently written a well received book, Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis. “[Disengagement] is created by wider factors such as high school educations, where high schools are mandated with keeping as many people in as long as possible to increase graduation rates, regardless of whether or not they’re interested in the material… we have a government telling everybody to get as much education as possible; we have a wider society of general disengagement from communities, from the political system and so forth. All these factors come together and produce a situation that universities are expected to fix.” Looking at the active, politically engaged students within the WH community, I can’t help but think that WH must be a small part of the solution to this problem.
Unfortunately, a lot of WH’s unique qualities have been lost. In the last few years, Windsor House’s fluid, personal democracy has been pitted against the rigid bureaucratic inanities of our education system. It highlighted the shortcomings of our system of government, while heavily altering Windsor House in the process. It placed a huge workload on the staff and caused many of the students, who were used to making their own decisions, to become disenfranchised and leave. It all started in a remote office, where these kinds of decisions are always made, far from the reality of the school. Someone in the Ministry of Education or possibly the North Vancouver School Board (NVSB) realized that there was no way WH could pass a provincial audit.
CHANGES
When the Liberal government was elected in 2001, they did two things: They switched their funding model so that more money was allocated on a per-student basis, meaning less was available for capital costs, and they also started auditing school districts and fining them if they didn’t meet Ministry standards. A home learning centre in New Westminster was dinged, and several sources tell me the ESL program in North Vancouver was too. And it’s not an inappropriate approach. Selena Couture, a teacher at the school points out: “It’s all this stuff about accountability. It’s public funds and we need to be accountable for the public funds…. And it’s reasonable, right? We can’t just take it.”
But a systemic provincial audit wouldn’t take into account WH’s unique nature. The district realized that if Windsor House were to be audited, they stood to lose upwards of 1.4 million dollars. Understandably, they freaked out and initiated a series of changes and audits to bring the school in line. This affected the place drastically, sending the community of parents, students, and teachers into crisis as they came to realize how little control they really had over the school they loved. “The defining moment,” says ex-student Lucy McNulty, “was we were all in a meeting, and… Fiona, Meghan, Verity, and I were all crying. So we said this is enough… what we had discovered in the meeting was that the structure of WH, the way we base our decisions could… be vetoed by the school board.”
And that’s exactly what the school board did. In the spring of 2004, they sent an internal auditor, Audrey Hobbs-Johnson, to assess how they should change the school so that it could pass audit. “She met with many, many people,” says Helen, and “did a really thorough job, and I think had quite a heart for WH.”
“We won her over,” says Meghan, and it seems she’s right — Hobbs-Johnson ended up recommending that her foster granddaughter go to Windsor House. Nonetheless, while Hobbs-Johnson may have been won over in spirit, her job was to assess whether the school would pass a ministry audit. At that time, there was no way it could have, and Hobbs-Johnson recommended that WH institute more rigorous attendance taking (they were well below provincial standards for attendance) and, among other things, start giving grades.
This was a huge problem for the school. In order to properly assess the kids, staff needed to actually know what they were doing all the time, and because of the self-directed, chaotic nature of the school, this was pretty much impossible. Besides, many of the teachers didn’t agree with the idea of assessment in the first place. “Most assessment in schools has been awful,” says Selena Couture, a current Windsor teacher.
“If you’re good at logical, linguistic stuff [then] you’re smart, and if you’re good at anything else you’re not, and it’s always based on a test. If you can write tests you’re fine, and if you can’t… That kind of assessment is useless and also damaging to lots of kids.” The staff was stuck. If they assessed the kids properly, they would compromise the school philosophy, and if they tried to assess them without changing the student experience at the school, the assessment wouldn’t meet the standards.
A questionnaire Meghan got the parents to fill out while Hobbs-Johnson was conducting the report is testament to this. It’s now included in Appendix ‘B’ of the report, and it contains a multiplicity of poignant snapshots of the tumultuous times the school has gone through. One parent writes, “Grading can be a demoralizing experience. It can also give a one-sided view of oneself.” Another, “I understand why we have to go through this, but I find it very insulting – Windsor House is an amazing program and people are choosing to come here from a grading concern.” Perhaps most strikingly, 14 of the 27 parents who were asked why they had chosen to keep their kids at WH answered, in one way or another, that their kid loved the school.
In crisis, the school started a series of meetings, involving the whole community of parents and students, and taking up the entire school gym. They went over their options and struggled with whether it was possible to reconcile their philosophy with the looming changes. Lots of people argued to break away, but this came with its own problems it would have been very expensive and they weren’t eligible even for 50 per cent of private school funding at this point, because that would have required they follow the same rules they were trying to break away from. The staff was busy trying to implement the changes the Hobbs-Johnson report had recommended, while trying to fight them at the same time. “It was really tough,” says Sylvia, the photographer, as she verbally threads her way through the intricate situation the school faced. “There were a lot of angry kids wandering around… opposing the teachers… and the teachers were just trying to do everything. They were trying to be cool and trying to be useful and they were also trying to fight their own feelings about it.”
A CHANGE OF SCENERY
While this was happening, other big changes were percolating. With the Liberal decrease in capital funding, the NVSB was anxious about how much money it was spending on facilities. With what seems like very little consultation, they moved WH from its beautiful location in the Cloverley building near Keith Road, to a few rooms in the back of the Lucas center, up a long hill behind Capilano mall. People said they were going to camp out in the parking lot for a “We Won’t Go” campaign. Sylvia remembers it being terrible. “I was trying to put that out of my mind,” she says, “I actually think I… experienced some kind of traumatic stress about leaving… when we got to the new building it was awful.”
The school tried to come up with alternative options to the move by seeking out partners to share in the rent and overhead. They found a daycare and a dance school who both agreed to leave their location and move into the previously empty basement of the Cloverley building, a multiplistic solution which fits very well with the current Liberal “hub of the community” model. But, “it was like their minds had already been made up,” says Susan Skinner, a parent who was starting to attend board meetings, “We came up with all this in the middle of the process, but maybe it was more like the end of the process, because it seemed to us that they weren’t listening.”
The school is now relegated to a few rooms in the back of a building they share with an adult education centre, a youth self-paced learning centre, and the administrative offices I mentioned before. Its windows look out on a works yard, surrounded by barbed wire, and filled with heavy machinery. It’s more like something you’d expect on the shores of the Fraser in Richmond than a schoolyard. One writer for Vancouver Magazine even likened it to a concentration camp.
While visiting the old Cloverley building, I notice the roof is covered in moss and the forest behind the school is overgrown. European blackberry and morning glory creep along the topsoil, winding their way around the fir, pine, and spruce, remnants of a massive WH naturalization project where invasive species were calmly picked out by student hands, and replaced with those endemic to BC. A hockey stick has been flung over the top of an open-air undercover area, and I think of the countless days we spent playing tag and pick-up hockey under that roof.
The School Board brought in another auditor.
This one would not be won over. “They completely ignored [the previous] review, and brought in someone else.” That someone was Shirley McBride, who did the first part of a two-stage report (to be followed up later, in the spring) just prior to Christmas 2004. According to Meghan, “they were looking for someone a lot tougher, who would actually address the concerns that they already had.” They found the right person. “She made it pretty clear to all of us,” says Helen, “that she didn’t like Windsor House… the whole time she was there, her face just emanated dislike. When she interviewed people, they felt uncomfortable.”
McBride wrote a devastating report, which made recommendations on everything from attendance procedures, to the way the staff played with children, to the fact that the school should have been doing tri-annual assemblies while singing the national anthem. Her distaste for the school is apparent despite the dry language of the report. Throughout the document, she comments on things that are not really in her mandate, mentioning when and where kids are eating lunch, and going so far as to note there were crumbs on a table, with recommendations that the school start better cleaning practices.
Again, the school was sent reeling. “It was just staggering,” says Helen. The staff met and tried to process the changes, going back and forth with the parents, trying to decide what to do. “A lot of it was grappling with how to do it so that it wouldn’t impact the kids,” says Verity Rolfe, a current teacher at WH, describing the difficulties of grading kids and keeping track of them when you’re also trying to let them do whatever they want. They put forward a number of suggestions for ways they could report on the kids, none of which were accepted.
With their ideals torn, the Windsor teachers began grading children. In doing so, they shouldered a huge workload. Attempting to shield the kids as much as they could, they “took the brunt of the changes,” says Selena (who taught me to write). “At first, when we didn’t know how to do them at all, it was a huge amount of work,” she goes on. The stress they were under at that time is hard to describe. “People were really sick, and couldn’t work and were way, way too stressed.” Selena has since stepped down from her teaching role, though she still works there part-time, as a librarian.
The parents unanimously agreed not to look at the report cards. The teachers now write them, and they’re still filed with the district, which uses them to track students credit, and the academic performance of the school, but to this day they sit in filing cabinets, where they will be kept on record by the district for 55 years. No child or parent will ever see them.
HELEN RETIRES
In the mean time, Helen, who had been the vice principal and chief administrator, was approaching retirement age. At the direction of the school board, Meghan and another teacher had both completed Masters’ degrees in the hopes of taking over when Helen left. They both applied, but only Meghan was called in for an interview, though she didn’t get the job. Instead, they offered it to a woman who’d never been to the school, and sight unseen, she took the job. In January 2005, she started administering the school as principal, over Helen. “For me it was a terrible, terrible experience,” Helen says. “Suddenly, having been in the leadership position at Windsor House for 34 years, I was second in command to someone who had been schooled and brought up in a hierarchical system, while we, of course, worked collaboratively.”
They lurched around for the rest of the year. Helen got sick from the stress, and the new principal and the school struggled to reconcile their differences From what I can gather, when she first moved in, the new principal, a career administrator, entered with the impression that she was there to change Windsor House. Not understanding the democratic structures of the school, she would override ruling of the school council, and under the rubric of safety would often forbid children from doing things they had been allowed to before. “You’d hear her yelling at them a lot,” says Sylvia, the ex-student photographer, “and them yelling back.”
And then something interesting happened. Robin Brayne, then Superintendent of the NVSB, who allegedly held a lot of sway over that group, presented his own report to the board, after Shirley McBride’s final report, which offered much more flexibility to the school. His framework for recommendations states: “The School Act provides considerable latitude and flexibility to School Boards to provide unique programs to meet particular student learning needs… It provides room for students wanting to learn anytime, at any place, or at any pace.”
“He took her report, and in my opinion, did something completely different,” says Meghan. “He created this very flexible document with the idea that everyone had to be on a student learning plan. In my mind, that was our win. That was where we actually saved the school.”
At the end of that year, the school threw a massive retirement party for Helen, which had 500 people in attendance and lasted for over eight hours. There was a comedy show, speeches, and a band. Helen tells me it was “wonderful,” and her voice glows with pride and happiness as she remembers the hundreds of people who came to honour her life’s work.
She still comes into the school, but she’s pulled away from it. “I think [Helen] had to distance herself… from WH when it started changing,” Sylvia says. “She fought so strongly for so long and I think it just started to wipe her out to see that no matter what she was doing, people were still coming in and changing it.”
A lot of the students have left, “because it was breaking our hearts,” says Lucy. The population has dropped by about 80 kids since its peak of 200 in the Cloverley days. Many of the Vancouver students simply couldn’t make the commute to its new remote location at the top of a long hill. “You’d walked up the hill to go to WH,” says Sylvia, “and at the beginning of the year people felt optimistic. Even though there were all the policies being put upon us, we still felt optimistic that we could get out of it some how… The hill was worth walking up back then. And then slowly, by the end of the year, it wasn’t worth it any more.”
“We decided to drop out,” Lucy says, “because we didn’t want to have to put up with that anymore, and we wanted to show people that we disagreed with how the North Van School Board was treating Windsor House. So we started our own… home schooling group… We met a few days a week, had coffee, read books, talked about our interests… We wrote and took photographs.” They were all around 16-years-old at the time.
But the school didn’t die. “WH is almost an entity of its own,” says Helen, “It’s almost beyond individual personality. And it just wouldn’t change that easily. There was a lot of stubborn resistance.” Verity echoes her: “It’s amazing it hasn’t been crushed entirely,” she says, “we doggedly kept fighting, and it’s starting to come around now.”
While a lot of older students and parents, who perhaps idolize the past (which all the teachers stress was never perfect), may have left, there is a constant input of new people, who “really get the philosophy,” says Verity. Nicole, a new student there as of September, loves the school. She’s in grade ten, and had been going to Kitsilano Secondary. “Compared to Kits, it’s so much better,” she says.
Another student, Sky Robertson is still attending, though she’s not getting any credits for the courses she’s taking. She does them because she wants to. “I’m using WH as a resource,” she says to me as she works on a costume, “rather than expecting the teachers to do it for me.” She’s twelve.
At present, the school has introduced an option for their high school students to attend WH while also obtaining standardized school credit. They can also now graduate, which they never could before. The staff are working on a partnership between WH and the Youth Learning Center (YLC), a self-paced program with which they share the building. Starting in September, students will be able to graduate through the YLC, while still pursuing their own interests at WH.
There are still thriving drama and film programs, along with students growing a garden, and there is a jam space, where many students have formed bands. WH is also one of the few schools in an increasingly paranoid district that still runs field trips, and last year, they completed an outdoor leadership program, in which students camped on the glacier on Garibaldi Mountain.
The staff work hard trying to fit the students’ self-directed activities into the provincial curriculum, which requires the teachers to grade them on it, and for the most part they have been successful. While the grade 10 – 12’s are forced to push their way through the graduation program, the younger kids are not heavily affected. “We’ve been forced to get to know the kids better academically than we did before,” Verity says, “so now we can offer them better support.” She goes on to describe the more developed reading and math program that they’re now implementing.
The new Principal has also started to change. She now uses School Council, and the other democratic structures of WH, and they’re working on developing a non-grade based, online system for giving feedback and assessment. “It does feel like shift [has been] taking place, and I think it’s because [the new Principal has been] backing what we’re doing,” says Meghan.
The teachers are still filing unseen report cards in their ever growing filing cabinets, but the kids, especially the little ones, are for the most part free to do what they want. The school is hoping to be moved to a better location some time soon.
“The culture of the school is intact,” says Verity. “It’s a lively, dynamic place, and still, I think, one of the most challenging environments students can grow up in, because it requires that kids figure out who they are and what they want to do, something people don’t usually have to face until their twenties.”
Meghan leaves me with this: “Right now, we raise our children to not believe that they have influence on their government or their democracy. But the world’s in a place now where it’s particularly important that we allow people to grow up to be citizens of an inclusive democracy, a democracy that actually functions as a democracy.”
