Clearway School, Inc.
– Foundations
One of the current co-directors at Clearway School asked
about how it all began. So I wrote this version of the history trying to
capture the best reasons that we did things the way we did them.
With Respect and Love,
Brad Watters, May 2014
Backstory
In 1974-75 school year, David, Holly, Alan, Sally, John, and
I were teachers and Victoria was the office manager of another small school
like Clearway. That school had in its past shared the leadership in some sort of
co-director model. By September 1974, when I started, there were two
co-directors. While these two had experience and skill, they also held
information closely and so decisions seemed arbitrary or perverse. Through the
year, things grew bad and by March and April, staff began to resign
"effective the end of the year." We would gather after school and sit
around feeling pretty sorry for ourselves until one day, someone started
talking about starting a school. My wife Debbie joined the effort to make us seven. We were all in
our 20's and early 30's.
Flatten the Org Chart
As those conversations progressed, our late-60's early-70's
mistrust for authority, which had been fertilized by the,
"experience" of the school year past, made various alternative models
of governance appealing. Think Summerhill. Recall that then current education
models had been shown to be discriminatory (Boston busing decision) and
inadequate (Chapter 766.) We thought we would create a school that combined a)
the best professional practices and innovations in teaching children with
learning disabilities and b) the opening of educational possibilities that the
alternative school movement was exploring. If avoiding a hierarchical model was
our starting point, we gradually made it our hallmark. We postulated that with
a clear focus on the healthy growth and education of our students and with the
clear advantage that we were all friends, we could make a school work. So
that's how we started thinking of ourselves as co-directors.
Personalities
We were friends and we were also a group of strong
personalities. There would be problems because of that (e.g., no founders
working at Clearway by 10 years out.) We knew there would be hassles and we
wanted to make sure we were at least making a tradeoff. What are the benefits
of having a bunch of strong individuals? Well, we varied enough from one
another that every kid ended up finding connection with at least some adult. So
we figured that as long as every kid was spending some time or had access to
every adult, those connections could happen. Tutoring became a mandatory part
of each kid's program. Also, we had an expectation of individuality for our
staff, as if it was written somewhere, "If you want to roll with us, you
needed to stand out." That expectation was exactly our approach to each of
our students. We wanted the ones who didn't fit in. We wanted them to learn
that what had been a handicap was going to turn out to be their strength.
My Classroom: My Rules
We were idiosyncratic about classroom and playing field
discipline. We had the idea that while some people (Hello, parents?) find
themselves saying, "I’m not going to let you talk that way to me young
man," others are just going to think you're funny. Some behaviors were
acceptable in Sally's classroom that made David nuts - so the kids had to
practice in school their already somewhat developed perception that those
differences existed. In response to "it's not fair! Holly let's
us..." my response could be "Oh, it's fair. It's just not the same.
You know I’m not Holly!" "Mom and Dad" don't actually agree all
the time and teacher independence inside and outside the classroom brought that
challenge into the social development curriculum.
It also removed one of the main functions the principal and
assistant principal have in most schools. So we made it a virtue that there was
no higher authority than the adult on the spot.
Community
The school was going to be small because that's all we could
imagine, really. Again, we chose to make this a hallmark. A small school would
have a good shot at creating community. We asserted that the power of the
community to self-regulate wasn't just a pipe dream of that guy over in England
(Summerhill, again.) We turned away from certain things that make some schools
run with a different logic. For example, we didn't segregate activities by age.
We did use some classroom leveling but we emphasized that we're all in this
together; school spirit! (The teams then were the Clearway Bulldozers. Don't
know how long that survived!) I think this is the impulse that led to the
community coming together on Fridays for an hour or so in a gathering we called
"moot." (Some of us were Tolkien fans, what can I say?) There were
certain rules and habits about moot and I forget most of them. In my mind, the
valuing of each person's contribution was somehow non-negotiable. If you had
something to say and were being appropriate, you got to speak. Also, each moot
was run by a different co-director. Moot was sometimes an activity, sometimes a
film, sometimes ... you get the idea. We tried to take advantage of the
differences in style and content. Friday's were half days.
Making Decisions
The biggest problem of having too many head chefs was, of
course, decision-making. We had a lot of decisions to make because we were
starting something new. We had a lot of decisions to make because we were full
of ideas. And, even though having every one of us taking that vaunted
idiosyncratic approach to kids was important to us, we needed the counterbalance
of a shared understanding of each kid and his or her needs.
School Decisions
Our pattern was to meet in our major meeting from lunch
Friday until we were done. Those meetings could run late! We all had thick
enough skins to handle them and, as painful and interminable as those meetings
could be, the group was very funny and we got through it.
Focus on a Kid
One of our best changes was how after a couple of years, we
teamed up with the extraordinary therapist Tod Gross of the Adams Street Associates
in Newtonville. Debbie and I had met Tod and his wife Jackie when taking
classes for our Masters at Lesley. They taught a class in adolescent psychology
that was clear and useful. We arranged for Tod to come to Clearway at the end
of school on Mondays. Staff would gather in a circle and one teacher would
present one of the kids he or she tutored. Then others of us would fill out the
picture of the kid with Tod drawing us out. There were two amazing aspects of
this arrangement with Tod. The first was that Tod is one of the more amazing
(did I already say amazing?) listeners and he drew out of us our best insights.
The second was that Tod is just good about adolescents, and people in general.
I think he did share his expertise with us sometimes but mostly, he made us the
best we could be. Maybe it would have worked with any outside group leader
because it definitely changed the chemistry of this group of co-directors to
have outside ears in the circle.
Divide and Trust
I also ought to mention that we did a lot of trusting.
Perhaps this flowed from us being friends but not all of us were friends to
start with. Still, we trusted each other to take on different roles. Victoria
and Sally became the gurus of state approval, of one sort or another. Victoria
and Debbie paid attention to how you do payroll and cash flow. I fixed
furniture. We trusted the ideas that each other produced. David and I took kids
to New Hampshire and stayed in cabins along the Appalachian Trail. At some
point, we hired Mark. This was a big deal because in our model, every newly
hired teacher would become an instant co-director. Mark fit in fine but I'm not
sure if the model could have been sustained any longer than we did.
I am pleased and proud to have been part of Clearway's
beginnings. But I'm also clear that it was the arrival of Mary Ryan that
positioned Clearway to survive and flourish and grow into what you are today.
It is her life's work.
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