Sudbury school

Yeah.

The Sudbury school model started in 1968 with the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, and now there are similar schools across the globe, including the Clearwater School, which is where I work in Seattle.

Many people are familiar with Montessori schools at this point, but Sudbury schools are even more divergent from the traditional classroom model than that.

Sudbury schools are student-directed, both in that students choose what, how, when they want to learn, and also in the democratic sense, because students and staff come together to comprise school meeting where they make the types of decisions that other schools would leave to adults, such as what are our school hours, how do we want the rooms to be used, what are our school rules, and so forth.

There are no mandatory classes, tests, grades, or homework, and there's no age segregation.

So it's a very different way of looking at education.

Can you talk about what makes this model a good fit for many PDA children and teens that you have worked with? And can you give some examples?

Yeah.

So we needed to find some kind of an alternative.

And that's when we found this remarkable alternative school called the Sudbury Valley School.

which was only two miles from our house, which at that time for a nine, by the time he started, he was 10 years old.

For a 10-year-old, that was an easy walk or a very easy bicycle ride at that time.

And he became very happy again once he started at that school.

And so what does he do today?

He's actually a staff member at the Sudbury Valley School, the school he went to.

I was