Monday, February 12, 2007

Alternative private school coming to city

By ANNA GUSTAFSON

Hour Staff Writer

NORWALK - Come next year, Norwalk will become one of about 900 places worldwide to have a Waldorf school within its borders.

Board members of the Waldorf school in Stamford, the Clover Hill School, plan to open the doors to the private alternative school in 2008. Currently searching for a permanent site for the school, parents and board members said they'll be able to temporarily rent space in a building on West Rocks Road if they're unable to find a permanent location before next year.

"It became clear that Norwalk is the perfect place to offer this alternative to mainstream education," said Anna Silber, a Waldorf teacher and Clover Hill board member. "There's nothing like it in the area, and it's easy for families from the north and south of Norwalk to get to."

Waldorf education, founded in 1919 in Germany, takes a "holistic" approach to schooling, focusing on a community oriented setting in which students create their own school books and one teacher remains with the students from first to eighth grade — the grades which will eventually make up Norwalk's Waldorf school.

Students in Waldorf schools spend much of their time outside, do not use computers or watch television news and students learn an "appreciation for their background and place in the world, not primarily as members of any specific nation, ethnic group or race, but as members of humanity and world citizens," according to the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America's, or AWSNA, Web site.

"We are looking for a media free childhood," Silber said. "Of course they know about and see computers and televisions and all of that, but we want to make sure pop culture doesn't hijack the students' education."

Waldorf students do not receive grades in elementary school and teachers and school officials focus on having the arts - playing instruments, dancing, painting - play a major role within the classroom.

Waldorf proponents say this approach is particularly appealing when faced with "the emphasis on testing in mainstream education today," as Silber said.

"Waldorf education focuses on the development of the child, not on teaching to the test," Silber continued.

The absence of state testing is an integral part of Waldorf founder Rudolph Steiner's educational philosophy, which advocated that education cater to "the needs of children rather than the demands of the government or economic forces, so he developed schools that encourage creativity and free-thinking," according to AWSNA's web site.

Parents said the lack of formal testing was one of the main elements that enticed them to send their children to the alternative schools.

"It's not that my kids would be bad off in public schools, but I was put off by the academic testing," said Mark Ancona, who has a 4-year-old daughter at the Waldorf school in Wilton, the Apple Blossom School and Family Center. "I've heard stories about having all this homework in first grade, when students have all this energy to play. In the school system, they have computers with the kids from the beginning, and the kids should be allowed to express themselves; you don't want these kids to be sitting in front of computers all day."

Most Waldorf schools are private, non-profit schools - as the Norwalk school will be - but about 30 Waldorf charter schools have sprung up in the U.S. over the past several years. No Waldorf charter school exists in Connecticut, and the bulk of these schools are in California. There are also some in Arizona, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, Wisconsin and Alaska.

For families in the local area, there are Waldorf schools in Stamford and Wilton, but neither of those schools go past kindergarten. The Norwalk Waldorf school will open with a first and possibly a second grade, and then incorporate one new grade each year until eighth grade. After eighth grade, there are no local Waldorf high schools. The closest high schools are in Manhattan and Long Island.

Clover Hill board members sponsored a meeting for interested parents on Jan. 11, and Silber said there are about 10 to 15 families poised to send their students to a Norwalk Waldorf school.

Board members will sponsor another meeting to discuss the grade-school initiative on March 3 at 10 a.m. at Fat Cat Pie Company on Wall Street in Norwalk.

Anna Gustafson may be reached via e-mail at agustafson@thehour.com