by Admin | Jun 12, 2017 | Blogs
Rainbow Alumnus, Geronimo Owen, graduated from Carolina Day School last week with the incredible honor of giving a speech directed at his fellow 2017 graduates. As he and his classmates step into a world of unknowns, Geronimo reminded them of the power of choice. Stepping into adulthood means both attaining the freedom to make your own choices and reciprocally it means taking responsibility for those choices. However many adults due to lack of opportunity and systems of domination never get that chance. Within the context of their excellent private education, Geronimo sees it as his and his classmates’ duty to live fully in the world and give of themselves completely, to make choices that align with their passions and purpose, and to exercise that power of choice with intention. While he appreciates the draws of comfort, he also urged his classmates to go beyond comfort, asking “Why should we ever be comfortable with comfort?”
When he reflects on all those big “why” questions – why spend so much energy and time and money on this high school degree – he sees beyond the “good education, good college, good job” pipeline. For him the reason is still somewhat elusive and yet totally clear. It’s all about connection. At Carolina Day he found a group of “passionate and creative people who care”. He learned to “never underestimate your classmates” as they have this wonderful ability to keep surprising you no matter how well you think you know them. Making authentic heart-felt connections with the people in his Carolina Day community is what made his experience so meaningful.
As the school that empowered him in his transition from middle school to high school, we couldn’t be more proud of Geronimo. It is the gift of a lifetime to see where our students wind up and how they continously adapt all they’ve learned to help them in their new surroundings. Thank you Geronimo for sharing your voice. A big congratulations to you and to your dearest mama, Renee Owen, our Executive Director, for completing yet another chapter in your bright lives.
by Renee Owen | Apr 29, 2016 | Blogs, CEO's Kaleidoscope, Director's Blog, Publications
Kaleidoscope, April 2016
The Maypole gets wrapped on Monday at the annual Rainbow May Day Celebration – a quintessential Rainbow event. Fairies, elves, ancient dances, strawberries and cream – anyone who can slip away for the morning from 10:30 to about 11:30 will be filled with the delights of spring and the gift of life. You are all invited!
The LONG Summary of the March 22 Community Circle
The last Kaleidoscope I published was right before the March Community Circle, which was about “Cracking the Nut.” How can we keep tuition affordable, while increasing teacher salaries and improving equity? We started the meeting with an overview of how the budget is developed each year at Rainbow, stressing that since 80% of our expenses are staff salaries and expenses, any raises in staff pay directly increases tuition. We noted that our overall financial standing is very solid as a non-profit organization.
There seemed to be general agreement that the need to pay our teachers at least equal to district public school teachers is paramount, and whether the money for that comes from fees or increased tuition, people are behind that effort in spirit. In fact, people have made the point that paying our teachers fairly is an equity issue.
However, there was also concern that increasing tuition would create a hardship on many current families who might not be able to stay through years of tuition increases, and as one parent expressed at the meeting, they don’t want Rainbow to become a culture of the elite, where only those of the highest income brackets attend. As I put it in one of the slides in my presentation, we want a culture of community, not a culture of commodity – the latter being more like a business, and the former a culture where a community of people are working together to create a successful nonprofit organization and to provide the healthiest and most loving atmosphere possible for our children. If tuition increases too much, would that increase the risk of a more transactional/commodity-based community developing?
How much would tuition increase annually in order to meet the current goal to raise teacher salaries to the level of district teachers within four years, along with other strategic plan goals, such as increasing diversity?
Approximately 7% a year, for four years. To provide some context, the national average for private school annual increase is 5.4%. For the 2016-17 school year, Rainbow tuitions are increasing 6.8% on average.
To simply maintain regular staff raises, we need to increase tuition about 4%/year. The extra 3% increase amounts to about $360 per family/per year on average, or about $30/month.
The most confusing aspect of the meeting was having teacher pay linked with increasing equity and diversity.
The primary reason for this linkage is that if teacher salaries increase dramatically, the higher cost of attending will make RCS even less equitable, further exasperating its inaccessibility to those of lower and moderate incomes.
What is the connection between equity and diversity?
Equity is not the same as equality. Equality means that everyone is treated exactly the same. Equity means that those who have fewer advantages are given a chance to have some of the same opportunities as those with more advantages. In a society where people are born into very inequitable situations, we all struggle with the issue of inequity: It’s inherent in our society, but an organization that believes in mitigating societal issues rather than exasperating them, would logically try to make its own culture as equitable as possible. In a private school, financial aid is an example of a tool that promotes equity. Those who can’t afford to pay 100% of tuition receive a discount. Roughly 25% of our school population already receives a tuition discount, including staff children.
What do we mean by diversity?
Diversity comes in many forms, including religious, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and gender identification, to name a few. We think/hope Rainbow is a fairly open and safe environment for most forms of diversity. However, racial diversity is severely lacking, and socio-economic diversity could be improved.
Why do we want diversity?
At the community circle, I presented a list of six primary reasons – too much to delve into within this newsletter. One reason is that we are a holistic school with a mission to develop leaders who will build a more compassionate world. We teach primarily using experiential learning, which means kids learn through experience. While we can cognitively teach students to be open, accepting, and empathetic of people of all types of races, incomes, etc, if they are not experiencing that diversity, it is very hard to embody that acceptance.
Is there a connection between racial diversity and socio-economic diversity?
In Asheville, yes. While the rest of the country is becoming more racially diverse, Asheville has one of the most severe gentrification circumstances in the country, making it whiter with each passing day. It’s been especially devastating for the African-American population. A mere few years ago, black people made up approximately 18% of our population. That number has sunk to as low as 8% by recent estimates. Of the black people who remain here, 59% are below the poverty line, and about 50% live in housing projects — some of the worst statistics for black people in the country. This is one of the reasons Asheville is extremely segregated along racial and income lines. There are very few middle class or wealthy African Americans in Asheville. Therefore, to build a more racially diverse population at Rainbow, statistically, we would have to offer affirmative action/financial aid funds, meaning increasing our socio-economic diversity as well. However, please don’t assume that all students of color at Rainbow are on financial aid, as that is not the case!
Isn’t there more to building a diverse school community than offering financial aid?
There sure is, which is one reason why we have a Director of Equity, why faculty have been focused on training around equity and racial understanding, and why we are auditing our classrooms and curriculum with an eye to equitability. Campus needs to feel like a safe, comfortable, and open atmosphere for all races. That includes having enough diversity that people don’t feel they are token members of a particular race.
Should our strategy be to increase teacher salaries first, and then focus on diversity?
I have had several people ask this, and it’s a fair question. Of course income is important to our teachers, but so is equity. These are people who got into teaching to change the world! That is why they are such great, passionate teachers. The staff doesn’t see this as an either/or situation. We aren’t going to EITHER raise teacher salaries OR improve equity; we need to do both. As one teacher put it, “I only want to work at a school that holds equity as a number one value.” Teachers know that to properly serve your child, they need to be a part of a community that walks the talk of one of our core pillars, as stated in our method: “We model within our community the kind of world in which we aspire to live.” Our teachers believe that all children should have access to an education like we have here. While we are practical about not being able to accept anyone and everyone on a sliding fee scale, we believe we can do better than we are now.
The good news is that all of the above is possible as long was we proceed at a modest pace.
Some of the revenue-gaining methods presented and discussed at the community circle to both increase teacher salaries and improve equity were:
-Increase the annual campaign
-Implement an extra fee that is on a sliding fee scale.
-Increase revenues outside the parent body by opening the Rainbow Institute to bring in large outside grants and also revenues for services. (To be continued…more on this in the next Kaleidoscope.)
We may do a combination of all of the above in order to mitigate tuition increases. Be assured that we will take this one step at a time. Our board and administration do an excellent job of managing our finances, and we will not take on any extra expenses without having the revenue in place. The plan that is adopted, with include a year-by-year analysis and opportunity to adapt.
As I said above, I have had many people approach me to say how important it is to them to pay our fabulous teachers fairly, and they were very willing to pay more tuition in support of that effort. That’s awesome! The teachers feel so supported! That spirit is what makes our community special. We also hope to find solutions to keep those families who can’t afford higher tuition here.
New ideas
Some good new ideas came out of the circle. My personal favorite was the idea to give parents the opportunity to make a donation any/every month along with their TADS payment. This would probably greatly increase the amount of funds donated each year. Margaret is trying to figure out if this is possible through the TADS platform.
Another idea that an expert in sustainable systems later gave to the board, is to calculate the value of attending school at Rainbow Community School, and work backwards from that. Of course, the value is much higher than the tuition that is actually being charged. New families coming in may choose to pay the full value, and current families could choose to continue at the current tuition trajectory.
OTHER NEWS
News of planning a high school
Yes, it is in our strategic plan to examine the feasibility of opening a high school within 7 to 10 years, but many of you have been very excited to learn that we were applying to the national XQ competition for the chance to win 10 million dollars for the purpose of starting a high school. I am honored to announce that our high school design is one of 347 that made it into the semi-finals out of the original 1200 teams. While we need to be realistic about our chances of being one of the five teams who wins $10,000,000; the competition has forced us get our high school concept on paper, which will be a huge advantage in the future, when/if the opportunity to open a high school presents itself. Some of you have asked if we do win the XQ competition, how long before the high school would open. XQ has not defined their preferred timeline, but it is rumored to be about three to five years.
How about those Lectica Scores? Hopefully, you got to read the exciting announcement about Rainbow scoring higher than any other school in the nation. Here is a link to the letter.
by Webmaster | Feb 21, 2009 | News
As parents we assume – by default – the role of teacher, whether we’re predisposed to it or not.
And most of us might agree that if we were only able to pass on one life-lesson to our children, just one, that it might very well be to teach them to think for themselves.
Daily, in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, we have “for generations“ done our best to reinforce the idea. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing; if they jumped off a cliff would you?
Or, conversely, maybe we take a more hands-on approach and model the behavior ourselves (doing our own research prior to a doctor’s visit or opting for a short-cut vs. the main-road).
Of course, we’re all familiar with the old adage, “Give a man a fish; feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; feed him for a lifetime particularly, in the education circles.
However, since it is still as true today as it was in 4-6th century BC when Lao Tzu coined the phrase, no wonder it’s till circulating.
If you teach a man to fish he will (hopefully) learn how to fish. But what if he doesn’t care for fish, or, like most of us, would prefer a more varied diet? What if he longs for rabbit, blackberries or a thick, juicy char-grilled portabella?
In fact, instead of teaching him one specific bit of information (how to fish) wouldn’t it be better to teach him a cognitive process he could apply towards anything? Wouldn’t it be ideal if you weren’t just teaching one man, but several together, who could mutually benefit from their shared experience and dialogue? Who could then take the analytical power you’ve invested in them out into the great big world and thrive?
I don’t know about you, but I am the product of a public education. We moved around a lot when I was growing up and I attended several school districts. Some better, some worse; overall, my education was a mixed bag. I can’t say how it compared to others, but I can say – with absolute conviction – that I did not really learn how to think for myself until I went to university. Not properly. Though I completed my last two years of high school in the same state in which I would later go on to university (California), once I got there, I – and many others I knew – struggled. There seemed to be collective feeling of despair at the educational chasm that faced us. Yes, we’d had some good, perhaps even great, teachers. But we’d still left a system largely fueled by textbook-led lectures, rote memorization and multiple-choice tests. The road was clear and easily navigated: the teacher talked, you followed the page in front of you; you studied. Then you fastened your seat belt, took out your carefully sharpened #2, and (quickly!) maneuvered your way through the bubbles. Suffice to say, I had little to fall back on when I was later faced, as a student at UC Santa Cruz, with the task of writing a 15-20pp paper on a poem from the traditional canon. I remember I choose Donne’s “Valediction Mourning†and that I received the worse marks (well, evaluation; back then UCSC still did evaluations) I’d ever received. I was shocked; I’d always believed I was good at English. Further, I was mortified to discover that in some classes I would be expected to lead lectures. For, up until then, I had managed (rather successfully) to escape getting up in front of the class for any considerable length of time.
If you’re still with me, I apologize for the delay in getting to my point. It’s taken me awhile to set the stage, but the reason I’ve gone into such personal (and hopefully not painful) detail is that I believe that for those of us who’ve gone through the public system, our experiences probably aren’t that different. In fact, it may be one of the primary things that attracted us as parents to RMCS in the first place…
We wanted something different for our children; something better. After all, their world differs vastly from the one we grew up in; for one thing it’s shrunk considerably. Technological advancements and an increasingly global marketplace have made our kids global citizens now. Yet, according to Wallis and Steptoe’s article in Time, How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century, “fewer than half of our (public) high school students are enrolled in a foreign-language class†and “the social studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. History.â€
It doesn’t really sound like – across the board – that much has changed; does it?
Yet, thanks to the Internet and other technological advancements our kids are exposed to far more information now that they ever were; literally bombarded with TMI. According to a recent article published on PhysOrg.com, researchers predict that “the Internet will double in size every 5.32 yearsâ€. Today, our kids are forced in a way we never were to process information more rapidly, and more intelligently. To not only distinguish a good source from a bad one, but to manage it successfully. (All a long departure from our own childhood when you went to the local library to do a report, and often had to wait days for the book you needed to arrive…)
Yet, one of the parents at the Community Circle Meeting, employed by a leading publisher in education, says she’s noticed an alarming shift lately; from the textbook driving the education system to technology becoming the main vehicle. This in a system that has traditionally placed more importance on teaching content than process.
And all in the face of respected research that directly contradicts such methodology. In the 70’s, the Carnegie Foundation conducted a study on learning and retention. They found that as much as 95% of all learning is “primaryâ€: meaning that which occurs spontaneously through encountering, embracing, and playing with our environment. Further, Allan Schore, a leading researcher in the field of neuropsychology, says (to paraphrase) that the brain is “experience dependentâ€; meaning that the actual growth of individual brain cells, and the learning connections they make, depend on their corresponding interactions with – and responses from – the environment.
Which, as a parent, is one of the things I admire most about RMCS’s curriculum; how it encourages and embraces experiential learning. How it recognizes that thematic, project-based and collaborative learning are vital. At the community circle meeting that day, one former alumnus disclosed that her choice for her independent project one year was Anne Frank, while her brother’s was root beer. Despite the dramatically different subject matter, they both learned a similar process; one that could – in the future – be applied towards anything.(Be it hunting, fishing or foraging.)
Obviously today’s kids need more than a public system that was, according to Wallis and Steptoe, “originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factoriesâ€. Now, in the 21st century, they need to “ 1) Know more about the world. 2) Think outside the box. 3) Become smarter about new sources of information and 4) Develop good people skills.†As a parent, I firmly believe that RMCS is ticking each – and every – one of these boxes. At the Community Circle meeting Renee said, “I can’t believe this school started in 1977, and just how far ahead it was philosophically.â€
Neither can I. Nor can I believe the panel of former RMCS alumni that were with us that day; all now freshman in the esteemed SILSA program at Asheville High School. I have never seen a group of more mature, more self-aware and more articulate young adults. I kept having to remind myself that they were high school – not university – freshman. Not only were they comfortable speaking to a room full of adults, they were extraordinary. When I compare myself – and my peers at that age – to the young people I saw before me, I feel like another species.  Not only did their testimony about their experiences at RMCS speak volumes, but so did their quiet confidence.  Now well into the first year of high school and all that it notoriously entails, these were not the kind of kids you might worry would lose their way. Instead, what was obvious is that they’re blazing their own, individual paths to the future.
Anyone concerned about the next generation should sit down and have a chat with them.
A special thanks to Sandra McCassim, RMCS’ 1st Grade Teacher, for her enlightening presentation. As well as former alumni: Wyatt Montgomery, Makenzie Peterson, Kaya Greenfield and Shannon Waldman.
Founded in 1977, Rainbow Mountain Children’s School offers a private, independent and alternative educational program for preschool through middle school-aged children that draws from the best in current educational thinking and holistic models of child development. It is recognized nationally as a leader in contemplative education.
Its progressive program supports the development of the whole child in five domains: mental, emotional, moral/social, physical and spiritual.
Marlo Bester-Sproul is a mother of a Rainbow Mountain Preschooler, and a writer and editor. You can reach her at www.writtenbird.com
