The School Vision

Visualizing the Whole Life School Alternative

written by Gary Sobolow – founder

I was a high school student in the 70s. My passions then were art and theatre. Were it not for those subjects I would have left school or maybe it would have left me. After graduating I floundered in college for two years and left when the City University of New York, like the rest of the city that year, went through financially difficult times, dropping all the courses I had agreed to take for my very unusual major of stringed instrument design and construction. Nevertheless, I made a career in art as a designer of a varied array of products. I even went back to college, graduating with a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a double-major in Glassblowing and Metalworking from Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

Six years ago, I had a bout with cancer and survived. In the process of pondering my mortality, I realized I wanted to give back in more direct and personal ways than I had been prior to my serious illness when I sat endlessly behind a computer screen designing pretty things. I also realized that I wanted to be near my daughter as much as possible now that my illness had impressed upon me the urgency of life.

So I left industry and became a computer technologies teacher at my daughters’ very expensive all-girls private school taking a huge cut in income to do so. My wife and I chose this school because my child had been diagnosed with ADHD, as I would have been if the doctors had a name for it when I was her age. We didn't want her to get lost in a public school.

After very little time in my new position I became unsettled. Although a rapid proliferation of technologies had done much to alter processes in business and industry and newer research studying learning processes had been published in books like "All Kinds of Minds" by Mel Levine and "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, little had changed in the thirty five years I had been away from high school corridors. Kids still came at the bell for a class that was given for fifty minute periods. They drifted in and out of consciousness, and counted down to the bell to go to another class and start again. The content still seemed to have little relation to the future a majority of these kids was going to face. The methods used to teach these concepts changed little as well, only now it was I who was the talking head trying my best to interest my proteges in more than what was to be “on the test.”

I started asking questions such as;

What are the essential skills kids need to learn so that they can be successful in a rapidly changing world where career tracks frequently shift and specific job skills need to be continuously updated?
Is there any new thinking in education and if so, is it being successfully deployed?
Why do we require our kids to "fit the mold" in high school and grade according to a standard that might not advantage a child's unique strengths when he or she, as graduates of the system, will find jobs that fit personally and leave those jobs that don't?
Is there an educational environment or model that can promote experimentation and change with the needs of the population and, if not, what might its design be?
How can a parent with an average income, like me, and a kid who needs an alternative learning environment, like my daughter, pay the exorbitant cost of that child's education?
Can a single school accommodate many different learning styles and do so in way that every child experiences success?

Finding the answer to these questions involved a lot of research. I spent hours in the local library reading books on school reform such as "The Manufactured Crisis : Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools" by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, "Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization" by Deborah Meier, and "Schools that Learn" by Peter Senge.

Ideas with the potential to improve education were abundant in these books and it was with these ideas that I started to design the Whole Life School. Content at this school would be student centered so the children would find relevance more readily to their lives as people in the real world more readily. The size of the school should be small, so that some adult in the school would miss a child if he or she were absent for even a day. It would respect the application of federal standards but find ways to make the preparation for the taking of high stakes tests a transparent part of the education of the whole child.

In the end, the school I envisioned already existed. I found the school in Eliot Levine’s book, "One Kid at a Time: Big Lessons from a Small School". This school is now known as the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (The Met). It is located in Providence, Rhode Island. Since its inception in 1993, it has spawned a foundation to support it and the many schools that are opening around the country under its auspices or guidance. That foundation is called the Big Picture Company. I found a similar plan in another book recently, “The Coolest School in America: How Small Learning Communities are Changing Everything”, edited by Doug Thomas, which describes The Minnesota New Country School, a charter school owned and operated by its teachers. These schools were successful in ways many traditionally look at school success. Despite having highly unique structures and methods, records showed that kids graduated, won college acceptances and good grades on the standardized exams.

There were no Big Picture Company schools in Pennsylvania and none slated to open. Additionally, there were no tuition-free schools designed specifically for kids like my daughter, kids that learned differently, kids like I had been. The Whole Life Charter School project was born.