You probably know that music changes lives. It brings people together. For this month’s team highlight, we wanted to share about Sue Ford, our longtime music teacher who is heavily involved in the Asheville community with Village Marimba.
A Brief History About Sue Ford
Sue Ford has been a part of Rainbow Community School as the music teacher since 2003. She left Rainbow for a little while to work at Evergreen Community Charter School in 2006. While there, she started a marimba band. Along her musical journey, she’d spent time studying with folks trained in playing marimba. In fact, she’s dabbled with marimba for a long time, even participating in a band called “Chikomo.”
After leaving Evergreen in 2016, Sue felt that she had the confidence to move ahead with the marimba business she’d started. At Rainbow, as part of that business, she offered to teach marimba after school. In that time, she’s had students from the 5th grade all the way through 12th grade join her marimba classes.
Due to demand, she began an adult marimba class last summer. It proved to be so popular that she added a second class. Many RCS staff have participated in these classes. Those who have taken Sue’s marimba class report that it feels so empowering and that it is a lot of fun.
During her tenure as a teacher, Sue has worked with students ranging in age from preschool through middle school. Mountain Express and the Asheville Community selected Sue Ford as the “Best Music Teacher” for four years in a row.
What Students Learn in Marimba Classes
Students in Village Marimba learn music that interests them, including popular music. They also incorporate multicultural music, work on their general marimba technique, and work in tandem with each other, as well as other musically-minded folks.
Take a look at one of her Village Marimba videos:
Expanding The Marimba Horizons
The historic significance of the marimba is important to Sue. The marimba instrument itself originated in Zimbabwe (a country that used to be known as Rhodesia).
Influenced by the equity work that Rainbow is doing, Sue thought about how the marimba has had such an impact on her life and influenced her music. She began thinking about how she could give back to the people who made the instrument possible.
Last fall, Sue got in touch with Peter Swing, a fellow marimba teacher and friend who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had connections with marimba musicians in Zimbabwe. Sue asked him if he knew anyone in Zimbabwe that would benefit from a donation from her company, as a way to give back.
Indeed he did! Peter put her in touch with a teacher in Zimbabwe. Shortly after, Sue launched a campaign to support the work of Barnabas Ngalande by raising over $1000 in two different fundraisers. Barnabas was a “mbira” teacher and with the proceeds from Sue’s campaign, he was able to build several of these instruments. Barnabas also sponsored three orphaned girls to send them to a high school with a music curriculum as a result of this funding.
In the weeks after the most recent benefit fundraiser, Sue received a letter from one of Barnabas’ students:
The three girls are part of Barnabas’ mbira group, “Mbirautare.” The student above, who wrote the thank-you letter to Sue, just enrolled in her school in January 2018.
We are so glad that Sue is part of Rainbow and that she is offering these classes to our community!
We have some pretty amazing staff here at Rainbow Community School.
We have so many folks with myriad talents.
This month’s team highlight is Katie Wilson, our 5th grade teaching assistant. You’ll never guess what Katie was able to do last summer.
It all starts with a story about how she found Rainbow in the first place.
How did Katie become a part of the staff at Rainbow?
Katie’s life has been serendipitous! She temporarily relocated to Boone, NC after living abroad. She’d been teaching English in Mexico and returned to the US to continue her teaching career here.
While up in Boone, she found out about an opening in the after school program at Rainbow and decided to take it. Right then, she was working as a nanny part-time.
She loved Rainbow so much, that when the opportunity came to be able to work with Susie in fourth grade as a full-time employee, she jumped at the chance.
Later, she was able to move up with the same students to fifth grade this year.
Earlier in the year, the director from a summer camp where Katie used to work contacted her.
He was leaving his company to focus on retirement and asked if she would be willing to take on directing the summer camp for international students who wanted to learn English.
Katie’s former director worked the business side of the camp while she worked the educational and development side, including overseeing staff.
Knowing that she always wanted to develop her own educational programs, it was a great opportunity.
This past summer, she developed the entire ESL curriculum for the summer camp, as well as all the programming. She also had the pleasure of locating it at Rainbow!
The Summer Camp: Visions USA
The camp operated by recruiting students from Germany, Spain, and Italy who were interested in learning English. It provided an authentic setting in which to learn English as a Second or Other Language, as well as give students an incredible international cultural experience.
Students stayed with local host families and attended English classes in the morning at Rainbow for four days per week, and then engaged in more fun activities in the afternoons.
They spent time volunteering one day per week as part of the program. Volunteer work is an important component of camp programming.
This gave international students a chance to see what the Asheville community was all about, the struggles people faced and provided visiting students with opportunities to give back to the community in which they were living and learning.
Similar to what Rainbow students do during the school year, campers went to Manna, Black Mountain Home for Kids to help with events, volunteered at local high schools, helped to paint a mural, and more.
Fridays were reserved as field days where they would go rafting, to Carrowinds, go on an overnight to see the Atlanta Braves, or other similar activities.
The camp also offered language courses for the host families’ siblings, as well.
What were some things Katie learned about running a summer camp?
The summer camp session of 2017 was incredibly successful.
Students from different countries experienced US culture, and experienced each others’ culture in a supportive environment.
In only three weeks, they became best friends and formed deep friendships that will last well beyond their time at camp.
Katie loved the fact that she was affiliated with Rainbow and how she was able to share the attitudes that Rainbow cultivates, including its teaching styles, with all the international students.
Activities included centering, teaching to the domains, and incorporating positive discipline techniques to students who hadn’t experienced that before.
[bctt tweet=”Students can tell that Rainbow Community School is different: they value the whole child.” username=”@rainbowcomsch”]
The international students could really tell that life at Rainbow was different.
They were accustomed to a more regimented school setting and often remarked about the freedom and support they had.
Were there any challenges you faced as you ran the camp?
Katie reported how it’s interesting that every country and municipality has stereotypes and attitudes that they form about other cultures and people.
She found it necessary to look for ways to get past those preconceived ideas and really reach students to show them that we humans are more alike than we are different.
Overall, however, she had a successful first year as the director of a summer camp right here at Rainbow! She’s already gearing up for the 2018 session.
If you’d like more information about summer camp and even possibly hosting students, check out Visions USA.
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.
