This week I went on a full day trip with the 4th through 8th graders from our school to the Brooklyn Free School (the website is really cool, check it out: http://brooklynfreeschool.org/). The school has been operating for 3 years, and is already at capacity in their current building. We went to the school to attend the convergence of northeastern democratic schools that was being held there. There were several different democratic schools that were represented including the Brooklyn Free School, the Albany Free School, the Harriet Tubman Free School, and the Hudson Valley Sudbury School. Each school had between 20 to 40 students and 5 to 10 teachers. In the morning there was a meeting of everyone in attendance. Each school gave a report of news from there school, talked about upcoming events, and then the students proposed events for after lunch.
After lunch there were many different activities offered. There were 3 different walking trips to parks and walkways in the area. There was a discussion on schools and pedagogy. I decided to go to the room designated for board games and I played Scrabble with students for a few hours.
All in all the day was very Free School-esque. There weren’t any required activities; people chose what they wanted to do. The Brooklyn Free School is a little smaller than the Albany Free School. The Brooklyn school is housed in a church that still holds services on weekends. The student population is more diverse than the Albany Free School. A majority of the students at the Albany Free School are white, but at the Brooklyn Free School there was more racial diversity. That is a very interesting fact because the Albany Free School is housed in a neighborhood that has a very high population of black residents, but the school population does not reflect that. The Brooklyn Free School must be more rooted in its neighborhood, or perhaps the idea is more widely accepted in New York City.
The interactions between the students and teachers at the Brooklyn Free School seemed relaxed.
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