Community Guide 2017
LAGUNITAS SCHOOL DISTRICT: A BRIEF HISTORY by Don Holmlund
third grade) in the San Geronimo Valley, with Sandy as the teacher, joined by a very enthusiastic and skillful group of parent volunteers. Judy Voets was a student teacher in this classroom at the time. When she completed her student teaching, she went to England to experience the “hands-on” approaches then becoming popular there. The British schools were using many materials and techniques that Judy recognized would be extremely useful for the program the Open’s founding families wanted to create. She brought back progressive teaching tools that were not used in California at that time. Some 150 fami- lies supported an expanded Open Classroom. The program was welcomed by some and vehemently opposed by others, but the School Board election of 1972 proved that a majority of the community supported alternatives in education. Rich- ard Sloan was elected to the Board with a mandate to create choices for parents. Board meetings were very contentious; one community member called Sloan a Communist, another said if the Open Classroom proposal passed, it “would be the end of Western Civilization as we know it.” Richard recalls that “it almost came to blows.” The program was adopted, and the district reformed the school into three programs. Parents were given a choice between the Open Classroom, the Existing Program, which consisted of the same teachers and classes as before, and the ABC Program (also known as Back to Basics), which consisted of a beefed up curriculum. The Open Classroom was able to hire outstanding teachers, and parental involve- ment, including classroom and financial support, remained extremely high. The ABC and Existing Programs also had stable enrollments and satisfied parents because they appre- ciated having a choice: Some children thrive in structured environments whereas others thrive in less structured class- rooms. They liked the fact that there were alternatives. Academics & Excellence Within a few years, due to teacher retirements and declining enrollment, the Existing Program was discontinued. In its place, another program was adopted, called Academics Plus, which gave families an even greater choice in their children’s education. This program offered greater enrichment in the curriculum including art and music. In the late 1970s, the ABC and Academics Plus programs merged into the A&E (Academics and Enrichment) Program, adding enrichment activities such as language (French) and dance. Parents of A&E students valued this program for many reasons: students learned in the traditional and structured manner; there were wonderful teachers; there were no combined grades; there were standardized tests by which comparisons could be made with other children and other schools. The A&E parents also were extremely active in the school, and would show up at
Beside the family, schools—and what happens in them— are the most important places in any community. The seeds of all future learning are planted there, social and athletic skills are nurtured, and values are explored. For more than 100 years, the Lagunitas School District has played a huge role in the lives of children, parents, and most residents of San Geronimo Valley. For the past 40-plus years, the Dis- trict has offered various programs to facilitate all of these goals. These programs have also been a reflection of various populations living in the Valley, and through the years, there has been tremendous parental involvement in all pro- grams within the school. In the late 1800s, when the population of the Valley was largely limited to the big ranches in Woodacre and San Geronimo, the first school was located on Roy’s Ranch in San Geronimo (near the duck pond on San Geronimo Valley Drive), and the San Geronimo School District was formed in the 1870s. A second school was built in 1904 in Lagunitas as land was being developed there. (This build- ing still exists as a private residence on W. Cintura Road in Lagunitas.) In 1924, a new school building was built to accommodate students from both schools, and the Laguni- tas School District was born. In 1967, the building was condemned (and became the current San Geronimo Valley Community Center) and a new building was built next door. Later buildings were added for the Open Classroom on the upper campus in the mid-1970s. Some portable buildings were added for the Middle School in the early 1980s, and after a bond issue passed, a permanent building for the Middle School was constructed and opened by the mid-1990s. The Community Gym was completed in 2010. The curriculum, teaching, and administration of the school was very stable and traditional until the late 1960s. At this time, the population of the Valley began to change. New resi- dents, a good number of them artists, workers in the helping professions, and escapees from the Haight, found homes here. Often they found common ground around civil rights issues. Many were raising families. They became involved in coopera- tive pre-school groups. They wanted change in the school. The Open Classroom Among them was Sandy Dorward, who was hired by the school as a teacher in 1970. Sandy and other parents, with support from the District Superintendent, began to develop an Open Classroom alternative. The group identi- fied four cornerstones upon which to build their program: parent participation, choice, play, and equal weight given to emotional growth/development. The fall of 1971 saw the first multi-graded Open Classroom (kindergarten –
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SGVCC
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