Sheila Mraz #teamhighlight

Sheila Mraz #teamhighlight

This Tuesday’s #teamhighlight features, Sheila Mraz, Rainbow Community School’s passionate, loving, and incredibly enthusiastic Admissions Director. Long before she arrived at Rainbow, Sheila was a committed student to the art of education. After growing up in Ohio and graduating from the University of Dayton, she took the bold step of moving to North Carolina on her own. She taught everywhere, from an inner city school in Charlotte, to a Hendersonville public school, to a local prep school. Her experiences, while fulfilling, left her questioning what her true purpose was exactly. Within each of the three very different environments in which she taught, she found restriction after restriction. She felt limited as a teacher and asked herself what effect she was truly having on her students. Not only that, she began seeking something more for children everywhere.

It was at this time that she brought two of her own children into the world and the issue became more pressing than ever. Sheila says, “I loved this child like nothing else. I saw perfection in him and wanted, needed a school that was different”. She homeschooled for a few years before stumbling upon Rainbow Community School. She had heard about it previously, but had been turned off by rumors from the past. When she visited the school herself, however, what she found astounded her. While she had experience with multi-disciplinary learning and broad thematic units, the depths of “holistic education” were totally unknown to her and yet resonated on profoundly personal and spiritual levels.

Having attended catholic school for all of her education, Sheila was used to having spirituality be part of her school culture. While she didn’t want catholic school for her kids, she did want them to have a safe space in which to explore and openly talk about their spiritualities. She was relieved to see that here was this school that neither shied away from integrating the spiritual into the pedagogical, nor held onto religiously dogmatic beliefs in the classroom. She both enrolled her sons and applied to work at Rainbow immediately. While she had always taught Middle School math and sciences, she was offered the special challenge of being the new 3rd grade teacher. Her sons started preschool and kindergarten and so began the epic saga of the Mraz family at Rainbow. Three years later Max Mrax, Sheila’s husband, joined the facilities department and soon thereafter Sheila transitioned from being a full time Rainbow teacher, to being a full time Rainbow cheerleader and Admissions Director.

It’s clear to anyone who has ever interacted with Sheila why she makes such a great Admissions Director. Not only is she insanely passionate about Rainbow and holistic education as both a teacher and a parent, not only can she bring her experiences as a teacher at other schools into the conversation, not only is she charismatic, emotionally intelligent, and socially adept, but she also has a sparkling authenticity that flows through her every interaction. When asked if she ever gets tired of giving the same tour to prospective families she responds, “Not at all. Every tour is going to be completely different. The first thing I ask is, ‘What question do you want to make sure is answered by the time you leave today?’ and always that first question that’s on the top of their heart helps me navigate the conversation because I know that that’s what’s most important to them.” In many ways Sheila sees her role as reaching far beyond Rainbow. She is both a gatekeeper to our community as well as a beacon of light to so many families who are looking for something different, something profound. When she welcomes prospective families into her magnificent sunlit, plant-filled office she takes the time, energy, and heart-space to create a safe environment. She explains it this way, “I know that when they’re talking about their most precious person in their world, their child, many emotions come up and I want to be able to let them know this is a comfortable place. It’s ok to be vulnerable, to open up. I want them to know that not only will you be accepted and loved but your child will be too”.

Sheila acknowledges that not everyone can attend Rainbow and when asked what the hardest part of her job was she immediately replied, “Telling families no. That we don’t have space. Time and time again. That to me, rips my heart out.” Just because a family doesn’t end up attending Rainbow doesn’t mean their relationship with Rainbow is over or that their time and emotional investment in the school was a waste. In fact Sheila thinks that it’s more important than ever before that families, no matter if they end up attending Rainbow or not, come to witness what is truly possible. She says, “I want them to know that this is what education can look like… and should look like. I want them to have this type of model to envision for their child. If they can come here, awesome, but in reality so few can, and I want them all to see education from a different angle. I see that as one one my most important roles.”

At heart Sheila is a changemaker, a feeler, and a doer. She is highly tuned into the emotional and social domains and is constantly considering her place within her community and how best to support all those around her. Plus, she is an absolute dynamo of a self-starter. A true live wire. Something you might not know about Sheila is that when her kids were little and she had stopped teaching for five years, she and her husband Max, started not one but two businesses: a white water rafting business and an event planning business. Now that she’s been in the groove of admissions for six years, she’s finally started the photography business she’s fantasized about for years. You can look her up at http://sheilamraz.com/photography/. This woman just does not stop.

And this featurette on Sheila would be utterly incomplete without an explicit shout out to Rainbow Community School Admissions, so… if you’d like to find out more about the school (especially Omega Middle School 😉 check out our website to request a private tour with Sheila! She’ll be so happy to welcome you into her loving office, ready to hear what’s at the very top of your heart.

Magical Moments of Asheville

Magical Moments of Asheville

Rainbow Community School has teamed up with The Vanishing Wheelchair to bring magic to Asheville on April 28 and 29!

Magic is all around us. At Rainbow magic is kept alive everyday through daily centerings, ceremonies, story-telling, and the spectacular wonder of learning. Rainbow teachers use many names for magic. Sometimes magic is the love shared between classmates, sometimes magic is watching the transformation of your citizen-science tree on campus, and sometimes magic is the patterns made by prime numbers on your math sheet.

The weekend after next we have the opportunity to learn from the people who have honed the craft of stage and street magic. The magic of illusion is one of the oldest performing arts in human history. We have been gathering around magicians, entranced by the hint of the supernatural, for hundreds of years. We invite you step back into the world of make-believe, while supporting Rainbow and The Vanishing Wheelchair in the process. Buy your tickets today for this weekend extravaganza of not only magic shows, but magic workshops too!

“Magical Moments of Asheville” is a two day magic festival beginning at 7 p.m. on Friday with The Vanishing Wheelchair’s “Magic, Mirth & Meaning” show and continuing all day Saturday with workshops on magic and juggling, a talk from Appalachian Fairy Folk School, a Kids Magic Show at 3 p.m., and a closing show at 8 p.m. highlighting a variety of Asheville performers.

Show tickets ($10 for adults, $5 for kids) can be purchased in the RCS office, at Magic Central magic shop at 175 Weaverville Highway, or online at http://www.vanishingwheelchair.org/the-rainbow-community-school-is-raising-money-by-magic/.

All events will be held at the Rainbow Community Center, 60 State Street. This event is a fundraiser for RCS and The Vanishing Wheelchair. Rainbow is a preschool through 8th grade alternative school located in the heart of West Asheville determined to share the Rainbow Seven Domains holistic education approach with teachers and students around the world. The Vanishing Wheelchair, Inc. is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit public charity dedicated to helping people with disabilities find their passion and meaning through the arts.

***FESTIVAL SCHEDULE***

Friday, April 28, 2017:
7 – 8:30 p.m. “Magic, Mirth and Meaning”:
$10 Adult, $5 Child
A family-friendly show with a meaning presented by members of The Vanishing Wheelchair, Inc., featuring magic, juggling, story telling, and singing. www.VanishingWheelchair.org

Saturday, April 29, 2017:
10 – 10: 45 a.m. Principles of Magic Workshop:
$10 Adult, $5 Child
Wendal Wandell helps you become a magician by learning tricks from the seven basic principles of magic (limit: 20 people). www.MagicWandell.com

11 – 11: 45 a.m. Juggling Gestures Workshop:
$10 Adult, $5 Child
Wendal Wandell demonstrates juggling techniques for the beginner with fun interactive practice (limit: 30 people). www.MagicWandell.com

1 – 1: 45 p.m. Appalachian Faeire Folk School:
$10 Adult, $5 Child
Storyteller Vixi Jil weaves together original and ancient faerie tales, enchanted walkabouts and personal accounts to help guide folks into explorations of discovery in the etheric realms (limit: 30 people).
www.VixiJil.com

3 – 4:00 p.m. WNC Magic Club Kid’s Show:
$10 Adult, $5 Child
A magic show presented by members of the Western North Carolina Magic Club for kids of all ages! www.WNCMagic.com

5 – 5: 45 a.m. Balloon Twisting Workshop:
$20 General, $5 Share
Marcie the Balloon Fairy teaches the basics of balloon twisting creations. Workshop includes professional kit Qualatex balloons, pump, and instructional DVD. Families wishing to share a kit just pay $20 for the kit and $5 each additional person for the workshop (limit: 30 people). www.Facebook.com/MarcieTheBalloonFairy

8 – 9:30 p.m. Magical Moments of Asheville Show:
$10 Adult, $5 Child
The Grand Finale, family-friendly show, featuring local talents of the Carolinas including comedian and magic shop owner Ricky D. Boone, magician and theatrical entertainer Wendal Wandell, cardician and magician Bobbini, the amazing magic of Wayne Anderson, story teller Vixi Jil, Forty Fingers and a Missing Tooth with jugglers Keith Campbell and Walter Beals, and famed WLOS’s Tales from the Red Rocker, Storylady Gwenda LedBetter.

www.VanishingWheelchair.org

Kaleidoscope – March 2016

Kaleidoscope – March 2016

Kaleidoscope: The many colorful things happening at Rainbow, from the Executive Director

Hello beautiful Rainbow Community.  I am so happy spring is here!  It was a mild winter in terms of weather, but emotionally speaking, I found it hard to keep the ol’ disposition sunny during the dark days of winter.  How about you?  Was it a little harder to be patient with your family or community?  At school, the kids seem fine with the darker days. In fact, in our fast-paced, extroverted world, the slower, inward days of winter are a time for the children to focus on academics.  At your child’s conference, you will find they have accomplished a lot over the winter months.

No matter what one’s age, the gloriousness of spring lifts the spirits, and it is good to see everyone outside more often.  Every grade, K-8 is busy with their citizen science outdoor projects.
What is citizen science?  It’s the collection and analysis of data that is contributed to national scientific projects.  So essentially, our students are participating in collaborative projects with professional scientists throughout the year to help identify trends or changes locally, regionally and nationally!  Here are the  projects our students are participating in:

  • Kindergarten and 2nd grade – Nature’s Notebook – recording observations of local plants and animals.
  • First grade – Project Squirrel – tracking our squirrel population.
  • Third, fourth and fifth grade – Project eBird – tracking bird populations on our campus and other local areas.
  • Omega –  Project Budburst – tracking plant phenophases throughout the year.

Speaking of science, did you see the cool one minute video that Michael and Ange made from the Design Fair and Science Fair? If not, CLICK HERE, and be sure to share it on social media!

Keeping Tuition Affordable: Help Crack the Nut! It sounds like there is going to be good attendance at this Community Circle meeting coming up on Tuesday, March 22nd, 4 – 6pm in the 4th Grade Classroom.  Child care is free during the meeting. Please be a part of this important discussion.  (More information is at the bottom of this Kaleidoscope.)

YOU make all the difference in the world
One of the strategies for “cracking the nut” is to raise grant funds, but this requires proof that our program works.  That requires lots of data, and YOUR data counts, literally!  PLEASE CLICK HERE NOW, and complete the research survey that PhD candidate, Alan Bush, has created.  Alan is tabulating all the answers and providing us with a report.  What an awesome opportunity – don’t miss it!

YOUR CHILDREN make all the difference in the world
Our Rainbow kids never cease to amaze me. I recently received this message from the highly esteemed Dr. Theo Dawson:

Hi Renee,

I’ve been checking out your students’ Reflective Judgment scores today and I think they may well be the most impressive results we’ve ever seen. It’s making my heart sing!

Warmly,
—Theo

Dr. Dawson, and her team at Lectica, has spent almost three decades creating tests that can assess student’s complexity of thinking and ability to reason ethically. This work is based out of research from the Mind, Brain, and Education program at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the work of Kurt Fischer.  Rainbow’s fourth through eighth graders took the Reflective Judgment test, which reveals how they think about inquiryevidencelearning & the mindtruth & certaintyconflict resolutionpersuasion, and deliberation.

As you can imagine, I was pretty thrilled to get a personal email from the head of the Lectica saying our students’ scores may be the best they have ever seen!! Soon, we will be receiving the formal score reports and sharing them with your children and with the world.  It is so exciting to finally have real scientific evidence proving what we already knew – Rainbow’s holistic program creates kids who are highly ethical, empathetic, and cognitively developed to a level of sophistication that is beyond their years. (Of course, Rainbow students score very well on traditional standardized tests too, but those tests only show a small sliver of rote skill attainment, without showing complexity of thinking or soft skill development.)

Rainbow students’ high level of social/emotional skills will serve them very well when applying to colleges. The most prestigious universities are now changing their application processes to make the SAT optional, and to stress empathy as the most important quality– and this trend is going to become much stronger by the time your kids are applying for college.  I recommend clicking the link for the following Washington Post article:  To get into college, Harvard report advocates for kindness instead of overachieving. 

Everyone a Changemaker!
Rainbow’s new Director of Equity, Kyja Wilburn, and I attended an Ashoka Changemaker Summit in February. CLICK HERE to view Kyja’s presentation on our experience at the summit, information about the Changemaker network, and some of her thoughts about building equity in schools.  If you haven’t met Kyja yet, this is a great introduction.  Incidentally, Kyja and first grade assistant, Clarissa, also coached Odyssey of the Mind this year, and our team is going to state!

Smart People Strategizing
On Wednesday, March 16, one of my professors from Columbia University Teacher’s College, Lyle Yorks, and his colleague, Harold Penton, are consulting with the Rainbow board on something called Blue Ocean Strategizing, and they will be interviewing various people on campus for research they are conducting.  (Another great opportunity for Rainbow!) I hope you get to meet them.

I can’t wait for Domain Day!
Domain Day is Friday, March 18, and the whole school is celebrating.  Children will spend almost the whole day “specializing” in one of their favorite domains in multi-age groups. I am one of the leaders for the spiritual domain.  Chris Weaver and I will be taking eight young children on a magical hero’s journey for the day.  I LOVE my job!

Rainbow-ize everything!
It will take many years before the new section of campus is “Rainbow-ized” like our old campus, but we make creative progress little by little.  This weekend, community muralist, Ian Wilkinson is painting a rainbow and a sun on the front of the Rainbow Community Center (auditorium) building.  Ian has created more than 40 murals in Asheville. His most famous is the chess player painted on Lexington Ave underneath Highway 240.

As promised above, more information on the upcoming Community Circle:
On Tuesday, March 22nd from 4-6pm, in the Fourth Grade Classroom, RCS will hold a Community Circle meeting. No fee for childcare during the meeting. As a community we have such amazing ideas and we each have incredible contributions to make to our school. We work together to solve so many challenges.  At this meeting, we need the collective wisdom of our community members to “help crack the nut!”

Rainbow Community School needs to solve the largest puzzle that we have.  The board calls it “the nut we have to crack.”  Essentially, the “nut” is that we charge tuition and that makes it hard to serve a wide array of families.  The “nut” is trying to figure out how to keep tuition as low as possible, so that Rainbow education isn’t just for those in the highest social-economic demographic. At the same time, we need to have enough revenue coming in to pay our staff, maintain/improve facilities, and to keep a low teacher/student ratio and all the quality programming that we have. Currently, we do it by paying our staff very low salaries.  Rainbow lead teachers make, on average, about $7,000 less a year than Buncombe County teachers and North Carolina ranks 46th in teacher pay in the US.

The board has decided that we have two major equity issues to tackle – racial equity and teacher pay equity.  There are only two ways to solve the teacher pay equity issue – either save money by staffing more kids per teacher or increase revenues.  Doing the former would compromise our quality, so that means focusing on the latter.
So, how can we increase revenues?  Tuition is our only consistent source of funding, and it makes up 95% of our revenues. Currently, tuition goes up quite a bit every year, just to keep up with the 3%-6% salary raise teachers receive annually.  If we started providing larger staff raises, tuition would have to increase immensely.

How else can we raise more revenue — A LOT of revenue, like $200,000/year more– without making Rainbow totally unaffordable?  We could have a much larger annual campaign, but the $80,000 we currently have is not easy.  We could raise tuition steeply, but on a sliding fee scale.  This has its obvious drawbacks.  People have also suggested we have an additional fee each year and families below a certain income wouldn’t have to pay it.  Again, this has some major drawbacks. While we may have to consider some of these options, the ultimate goal is to get creative and find funding – consistent annual funding — from outside the parent body.

COME TO THE COMMUNITY CIRCLE MEETING ON MARCH 22nd TO HELP US FIGURE THIS OUT AND MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD!

We need the collective wisdom of our community members to crack this nut!

We hope to see you there.

EVENT: RCS Open House February 17th, 2016

 

Open-House-2-17-16-web

Rainbow Community School is having an open house event on Wednesday, February the 17th from 4pm to 6pm. This is a drop in event and both parents and kids are welcome to attend. This is a great opportunity to meet the teachers, learn more about specific grades, and get your questions answered.